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OTHER BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR 


THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM 

THE GIFT OF TONGUES 

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL BOOK EVER WRITTEN 
GREAT CHARACTERS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 
PAUL AND HIS EPISTLES 

JOHN AND HIS WRITINGS 

THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS AND THE BOOK OF ACTS 
THE NEW TESTAMENT EPISTLES 

GREEK CULTURE AND THE GREEK TESTAMENT 


The Heights of 
Christian Love 


A STUDY OF ( 


First Corinthians Thirteen. 


By 
DOREMUS A. HAYES 


Chair of New Testament Interpretation, Graduate School 
of Theology, Evanston, Ill. 





THE ABINGDON PRESS 
NEW YORK CINCINNATI 


Copyright, 1926, by 
DOREMUS A. HAYES 


All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign 
languages, including the Scandinavian. 


Printed in the United States of America 


To 
HESTER 








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CONTENTS 


PART ONE 
CLIMBING THE TRAIL PAGE 
CLIMBING THD ERA TIN er CR le ten ak os 11 
PART TWO hi 


ON THE BROAD TABLE-LAND 


. LOVE’s LoNG-SUFFERING AND KINDNESS. 53 


SERIO Y OMANITY INN 7s 05 yA beaten oes a a 75 
OVE AND EGOTIGM . ooo ke a tiire ce bas 89 
. LOVE AND EXTIQUBTTE. : 2.0.0.5 00.2.4. 121 
ROVE Ay ITS KIGHTS te ier its ies 139 
PS LOVH AND LL EMPDR occis os oak Aue os 161 
CRU VIEAN OY CULL ft ook e's oe be ne etateer he 173 
LOVE AND: THE TRUTH. oR el ly au 193 
. Toe Crimaxinae Risume.............. 211 
PART THREE 


IN THE HEIGHTS 
De ram igus: oh. Poa. se te 221 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


httos://archive.org/details/heightsofchristi0OOhaye 0 


PART ONE 


CLIMBING THE TRAIL 


) a Le B ‘ K 
ry 
ae 


at OAE ke 
“rT Ore 
r 





CLIMBING THE TRAIL 


I. Tue Hicuest HEIGHT 


THE Yosemite Valley in California is one 
of nature’s wonderiands. Take any trail you 
choose and it will lead you into marvelous 
displays of natural beauty and far-reaching 
vision. We stood upon Glacier Point, three 
thousand two hundred and fifty feet above 
the valley floor, and looked down upon the 
great hotels which seemed like doll houses 
and the men and women who walked about 
them like moving specks, and then we 
looked away to the Vernal and Nevada Falls 
and on to the crest of the Sierras through a 
sweep of forty miles; and we were ready to 
say, “Nothing could be more impressive than 
this.” 

On another day we climbed to the top of 
Eagle Peak on the opposite side of the valley, 
five hundred feet higher into the air, and we 
found that the view from that point was wider 
and grander still. On yet another day we 
toiled up the trail which led us past the 


Vernal Falls and the Nevada Falls and round 
il 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


the Cap of Liberty through the Little Yosemite 
past South Dome to the towering peak they 
called Cloud’s Rest, six thousand feet above 
the valley, ten thousand feet above the sea, the 
highest accessible point in that region, and 
there we found what was possibly the finest 
panoramic view with the most far-reaching 
and varied and striking topographical out- 
look to be seen anywhere in the mountains of 
America. 

To the earnest student of Scripture the 
Epistles of Paul are a wonderland, filled with 
marvels of literary beauty and _ spiritual 
power. Anyone who follows their guidance 
will be led again and again into mountain 
heights of marvelous vision, where spir- 
itual horizons will be like unto that at Glacier 
Point or Eagle Peak or Cloud’s Rest in Yosem- 
ite; and again and again one will be tempted 
to say, “This is the highest height of exaltation 
to which even such a giant genius as that of 
Paul can lead me, for nothing can be more im- 
pressive and sublime than this.” The eighth 
chapter of Romans, the first chapter of Ephe- 
sians, the fifteenth chapter of First Corin- 
thians—these are like Glacier Point or Eagle 
Peak or Sentinel Dome; but almost all the 
authorities and lovers of the Scripture are 
agreed that there is one passage which towers 


12 


CLIMBING THE TRAIL 


above all the rest, the highest reach of the 
apostle’s genius, the highest peak in the Paul- 
ine Epistles. That highest height of the 
apostle’s inspiration is to be found in the thir- 
teenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Cor- 
inthians. 

Dean Alford said of this chapter that it was 
a pure and perfect gem, perhaps the noblest 
assemblage of beautiful thoughts in beautiful 
language extant in this our world; and a re- 
cent writer declares of it that it is beyond ques- 
tion the noblest statement of all that a Chris- 
tian man ought to be and do and suffer, that 
has ever been penned. Other passages in the 
Pauline Epistles may be very precious to us; 
but if we would enjoy the very best which Paul 
has to offer us, we must read and study, ap- 
propriate and absorb until it becomes a very 
part of our being, the thirteenth chapter of the 
First Epistle to Corinth. Paul never wrote 
anything else t to equal it. This is chapter _ is the 
brightest_ gem among all his | treasures, the 
fairest flower to be plucked in his garden, 
the highest mountain peak to which even 
his daring spirit could ascend. Shall we 
endeavor to climb this trail by his side? Let 
us first notice one curious fact concerning 
this chapter. It is merely an aside, a paren- 
thesis. 

13 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


Ii. A PARENTHESIS 


Paul is writing to the Corinthians about the 
spiritual gifts which God had bestowed upon 
them. There were marvelous charisms in their 
church, gifts of healing, working of miracles, 
discerning of spirits, eloquence of prophecy, 
diversities of tongues, interpretations of 
tongues. In the twelfth chapter the apostle 
makes a general presentation of the subject, 
emphasizing especially the diversity and the 
varying value among these gifts, while he en- 
deavors to show that they all have one source 
and therefore ought to work toward one end. 
In the fourteenth chapter Paul proceeds to a 
discussion of particular gifts, and especially 
the gift of tongues. Between the twelfth and 
the fourteenth chapters he interrupts himself 
to say, “I will show you a more excellent way.” 
Then he makes of the thirteenth chapter a 
pean of praise to perfect love. The chapter is 
a parenthesis, but it is greater than other 
men’s volumes. The Faith Chapter of the New 
Testament is another parenthesis. The 
eleventh chapter of Hebrews, which sings the 
triumphs of faith, is an interruption of the 
author’s argument, an insertion by the way, 
and yet the most precious chapter of the entire 


Epistle to us. It is just so with the thirteenth 
14 


CLIMBING THE TRAIL 


chapter of First Corinthians. It is an aside, 
an insertion, a parenthesis, but we would not 
exchange it for any. other chapter written by 
Paul. 


Iif. THe Sussect, Love 


The chapter is a poem in praise of Chris- 
tian love. We would have expected it to be 
written by the apostle John. John is the 
Apostle of Love in the New Testament. He 
was the beloved disciple among the twelve. 
The Epistles of John are love letters, filled 
with exhortations to and protestations of 
love. We would have expected John to com- 
pose a poem to Christian love; but it is one of 
the paradoxes of church history that it was 
not John but Paul to whom the privilege was 
granted of writing the most glorious presenta- 
tion of love to be found in the Bible or in the 


' world’s literature. 


Paul is called the Apostle of Faith, but it 
is he who writes, “The greatest of these is 
love.”* John is called the Apostle of Love, 
but he wrote the fourth Gospel and said at the 
end of it, “These things are written that ye 
may believe’’*—not that ye may love but “that 
ye may believe.” The Apostle of Love writes 





+1 Cor. 13, 13: 
2 John 20. 31. 
15 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


the gospel for Faith. The Apostle of Faith 
writes the incomparable Eulogy of Love. 

Paul was not much given to poetry. He was 
a lawyer by instinct, a logician in practice, a 
prince among executives, a man of action, no 
dreamer or rhapsodist. Yet here for a mo- 
ment his pen is poetically inspired and he 
rises into the transcendent heights, and with 
illimitable spiritual vision he describes the 
queen of Christian graces, and on the most 
sublime summit of Christian attainment on 
earth and in heaven he plants the religious 
ideal of the New ‘Testament revelation, 
charity or Christian love. He shows that the 
love involved alone can give any value to all 
the spiritual gifts in their personal posses- 
Sion or their public manifestation, and that 
love has eternal worth, while all these things 
will pass away. He shows that love is the 
primal necessity and the eternal necessity as 
well in the Christian life. It is the incompar- 
able gift, the most excellent way. 

Paul puts into his description of it all gra- 
cious attributes, all lovable traits, and yet 
seems scarcely satisfied. Many writers have 
made the same attempt worthily to describe 
this chief of all the graces, and have felt 
their own inadequacy. Let us look at a few 


of these, before we continue our study. 
16 


CLIMBING THE TRAIL 


TV. OvTuHeEr DESCRIPTIONS OF LOVE 


1. Five hundred years before Paul’s day 

Plato had essayed to sing the praises of 
love. It may be that Paul had read his words 
and thought that he could improve upon them. 
“From the love of the beautiful,” Plato said, 
“has sprung every good in heaven and earth. 
Therefore I say of Love, that he is the cause 
of what is fairest and best in all things. 
Love is our lord, supplying kindness and ban- 
ishing unkindness, giving friendship and for- 
giving enmity, the joy of the good, the wonder 
of the wise, the amazement of the gods; de- 
sired by those who have no part in him, and 
precious to those who have the better part in 
him; parent of delicacy, luxury, desire, fond- 
ness, softness, grace; regardful of the good, re- 
gardless of the evil; in every word, work, wish, 
fear—pilot, helper, defender, saviour; glory of 
gods and men, leader best and brightest; in 
whose footsteps let every man follow, chant- 
ing a hymn of praise and joining in that fair 
strain with which Love charms the souls of 
gods and men.” 

2. Chrysostom, the most eloquent of the 
church Fathers, discourses upon Love in the 
following fashion: “Consider how great a 


blessing it is of itself to exercise love; what 
17 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


cheerfulness it produces, in how great grace it 
establishes the soul !—a thing which above all 
is a choice quality of it. For the other parts 
of virtue have each their trouble yoked with 
them. But love, along with the gain, hath 
great pleasure too, and no trouble—and, like 
an industrious bee gathering the sweets from 
every flower, deposits them in the soul of him 
who loveth. Though anyone be a slave, it 
renders slavery sweeter than liberty—for he 
who loveth rejoiceth not so much in command- 
ing as in being commanded—although to com- 
mand is sweet: but Love changes the nature of 
things, and presents herself with all blessings 
in her hands, gentler than any mother, 
wealthier than any queen, and makes difficul- 
ties light and easy, making out virtue to be 
facile, but vice very bitter to us. As thus: to 
expend seems grievous, yet Love makes it 
pleasant; to receive other men’s goods, pleas- 
ant, yet Love suffers it not to appear pleasant, 
but frames our minds to avoid it as evil. 
Again, to speak evil seems to be pleasant to 
all; but Love, while making this out to be 
bitter, causeth speaking well to be pleasant; 
for nothing is so sweet to us as to be praising 
one whom we love. Again, anger hath a kind 
of pleasure: but in this case no longer; rather 


all its sinews are taken away; . . . so faris 
18 


CLIMBING THE TRAIL 


Love from being exasperated. And should 
Love behold one in error, Love mourns and 
is in pain; yet even this pain itself brings 
pleasure. . . . But there is, saith one, a 
profane pleasure in love. Avaunt! and hold 
thy peace, whoever thou art! For nothing is 
so pure from such pleasure as genuine love. 
Love considers the profit of them that are 
loved.” , 

3. Thomas a Kempis, the greatest of the 
medieval mystics, in his Imitation of Christ 
has a chapter on “The Wonderful Effect of 
Divine Love,” in which are these paragraphs 
descriptive of the graces of Love. 


“Love is a great thing, 
A blessing very good, 
The only thing that makes all burdens light, 
Bearing evenly what is uneven, 
Carrying a weight, not feeling it, 
Turning all bitterness to a sweet savor. 
The noble love of Jesus drives men on to do great deeds, 
And always rouses, them to long for what is better. 


“Nothing is sweeter, stronger, broader, higher, 
Fuller, better, or more pleasant in heaven or earth; 
It is the child of God, 

Nor can it rest except in him, 
Above the world created. 


“Tt feels no weight, 
Makes light of toil, 
Would do more than it can, 
19 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


Pleads no impossibility, 
Because it thinks it can and may do all. 


“Love is swift, sincere, 
Pious, pleasant, and delightsome, 
Brave, patient, faithful, 
Careful, longsuffering, manly, 
Never seeking its own good; 
For where a man looks for himself 
He falls away from love.” 


Of course these descriptions by Thomas 
a Kempis and Chrysostom are modeled more 
or less upon the one by Paul. The same thing 
is true of the one which comes nearest to Paul 
in time in Christian literature. 

4. One of Paul’s fellow laborers at Philippi 
was a man called Clement, whose name the 
apostle says was written in the book of life.’ 
After Paul’s martyrdom and while the apostle 
John was still living in his old age at Ephesus, 
church tradition says that this Clement, as 
the friend and companion of both Peter and 
Paul, was chosen to stand at the head of the 
Christian church at Rome. Whether Clement 
of Rome was the Clement of the Philippian 
epistle or not, we know that in his capacity of 
presbyter or bishop of the Roman church he 
wrote an epistle to the Corinthians, probably 
about the year 95 of our era. For some cen- | 
turies this epistle was read in many of the 


1 Phil. 4. 3. 





20 


CLIMBING THE TRAIL 


churches as almost if not quite on a level with 
the apostolical and canonical writings them- 
selves. The forty-ninth chapter of that epistle 
is a chapter in praise of Christian love, and it 
has many points of resemblance to the chapter 
written by Paul. Clement, even more than 
Paul, seems to be overcome by his sense of the 
impossibility of doing anything like adequate 
justice to his theme. 

He says: “Who can describe the blessed 
bond of the love of God? What man is able 
to tell the excellence of its beauty, as it ought 
to be told? The height to which love exalts is 
unspeakable. Love unites us to God. Love 
covers a multitude of sins. Love beareth all 
things, is long-suffering in all things. There 
is nothing base, nothing arrogant in love. Love 
admits of no schisms: love gives rise to no 
seditions: love does all things in harmony. 
By love have all the elect of God been made 
perfect ; without love nothing is well pleasing 
to God. In love has the Lord taken us to him- 
self. On account of the love he bore us, Jesus 
Christ our Lord gave his blood for us by the 
will of God; his flesh for our flesh, and his soul 
for our souls. Ye see, beloved, how great and 
wonderful a thing is love, and that there is no 
declaring its perfections.” 


Clement was right. The half never yet has 
21 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


been told of love’s sublimity. Irenzus, one of 
the church Fathers, declared of love that “it 
is a most excellent present from heaven, the 
top and zenith of all virtues, gifts, and powers 
of God.” It is all that, and more. The love of 
God is indescribable, inexhaustible, infinite. 
The love of Christ was greater love than this 
world ever had known or than men ever will 
realize. This love of God and love of Christ 
as cherished in’'a human heart and incarnated 
in a human life has beauties and nobilities in 
it which no human pen adequately can de- 
scribe. Yet Paul has essayed to hint at cer- 
tain unfailing characteristics which love has. 
We turn next to an analysis of his descrip- 
tion. 


V. ANALYSIS OF PAUL’S DESCRIPTION 


The description proper is found in verses 
four to seven inclusive. Findlay tells us that 
these verses run in seven couplets, arranged 
as one affirmative, four negative, and then two 
more affirmative verse lines, with the subject 
repeated at the head of the second line. The 
verse which closes the middle longer move- 
ment becomes a triplet, making a pause in the 
chant by the antithetical repetition of the 
second clause. The paragraph then reads as 


follows: 
22 


CLIMBING THE TRAIL 


Love suffers long, shows kindness. 
Love envies not, makes no self-display ; 
Is not puffed up, behaves not unseemly; 
Seeks not her own advantage, is not em- 
bittered ; 
Imputes not evil, rejoices not at wrong, 
but shares in the joy of the truth. 
All things she tolerates, all things she be- 
lieves ; 
_ All things she hopes for, all things she en- 
dures. 


_ Findlay says further that the first line sup- 
plies the general theme, defining the two 
fundamental excellencies of Love—her pa- 
tience toward evil and kindly activity in good. 
In the negative movement, the first half-lines 
set forth Love’s attitude—free from jealousy, 
arrogance, avarice, grudge-bearing; while the 
second member in each case sets forth her 
temper—modest, refined in feeling, placable, 
having her joy in goodness. The third move- 
ment reverts to the opening note, on which it 
descants. We are not sure that Paul con- 
sciously adopted any metrical movements at 
this point, but all impassioned prose writing 
tends to adopt. poetical forms, and we already 
have called this chapter Paul’s sublime poem 


in praise of Christian love. 
23 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


VI. THE SIMPLICITY OF THE CHAPTER 


The sublimity of the chapter is most ap- 
parent in its simplicity. Anyone can under- 
stand it, and anyone can appreciate it to the 
full. It is a fact, as John Wesley suggests, 
that it immediately commends itself to every 
man’s conscience, and nothing is more com- 
mon than to find even those who deny the au- 
thority of the Holy Scriptures, yet affirming, 
“This is my religion; that which is described 
in the thirteenth chapter of the Corinthians.” 
He tells us of a Jew, a physician living in 
Georgia, who used to say with great earnest- 
ness: “Paul of Tarsus is one of the finest 
writers I have ever read. I wish the thir- 
teenth chapter of his first letter to the Cor- 
inthians were written in letters of gold. And 
I wish every Jew were to carry it with him 
wherever he went.” And then John Wesley 
adds, “He judged (and herein he judged 
rightly), that this single chapter contained 
the whole of true religion. It contains what- 
soever things are just, whatsoever things are 
pure, whatsoever things are lovely: if there 
be any virtue, if there be any praise, it is all 
contained in this.” 


24 


CLIMBING THE TRAIL 


VII. THE GREATNESS OF THE THEME 


It is a beautiful chapter and a wonderful 
chapter, one of the most precious to be found 
in the Book. We ought to study it carefully, 
prayerfully, until we have mastered its mean- 
ing and are prepared to realize its possibili- 
ties. It may take time and toil. It may be 
like climbing a mountain trail to Cloud’s 
Rest; but Paul will lead us at last to a height 
of spiritual attainment and exaltation in 
which we may be made perfect in love. 

Lesser attainments are necessary, other 
things are desirable, we may stand on other 
mountain peaks and have our souls filled with 
wonder and silent admiration, but Paul takes 
us by the hand and says, “Covet earnestly the 
best gifts; come, I will show you a more excel- 
lent way.” Then he leads us into the heights 
of this thirteenth chapter. From peak to peak 
we ascend, past the heights of eloquence, 
prophecy, faith, world-wide benevolence; and 
then as the winding path leads us up and up 
the central crest and we pass from one point 
of view to another we see Love’s patience, 
kindness, humility, courtesy, unselfishness, 
divinity and eternity; and when at last we 
stand on the broad tableland of the summit we 


see above us the cloudless heaven, around us 
25 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


the limitless horizon, beneath us all the lower 
heights through which we climbed, and, look- 
ing down on all that lies below, we see and 
know that Paul speaks the truth when he says, 
“The greatest of these is love.” 

Rowland Hill once said, “Cultivate a spirit 
of love. Love is the diamond amongst the 
jewels of the believer’s breastplate. The other 
graces shine like the precious stones of nature, 
with their own peculiar luster and various 
hues, but the diamond is white. Now, in white 
all the colors are united; so in love is centered 
every other grace and virtue. Love is the ful- 
filling of the law.” Jeremy Taylor held an 
equally high estimate of love’s value. He said: 
“Love is the greatest thing that God can give 
us, for himself is love. And it is the greatest 
thing we can give to God, for it will also give 
ourselves, and carry with it all that is ours.” 
Faith is a mighty force; “hope springs eternal 
in the human breast,” but love is the greatest 
of these graces of the soul. 


VIIT. Love Greater THAN OTHER GRACES 


Paul begins this wonderful chapter by show- 
ing that this is true, first of all, in a com- 
parison of love with other splendid gifts and 
in their contrast proving love more excellent 


than they. 
26 


CLIMBING THE TRAIL 


1. Eloquence. “Though I speak with the 
tongues of men and angels, though I have ail 
the gifts of eloquence which ever graced the 
tribune or made the prophet a power, though 
I could preach till people cried and groaned 
and laughed and shouted and forgot them- 
selves under the spell of my oratory, though I 
had all the genius of the old poets and philos- 
ophers and masters of style, of Isocrates, 
Eschines, Demosthenes, of Amos or Isaiah, 
though hearts were moved and lives were 
bettered and souls were saved under every ser- 
mon, and yet I had not love, I would be but 
sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. I 
would rather be a stammerer and a stutterer, 
I would rather be dumb all my days, and have 
my soul filled to overflowing with Christian 
love, than to be the most eloquent preacher of 
the new faith, preaching for fame or for a 
salary and without any personal experience 
of Christ’s love in my heart. Eloquence is de- 
sirable, but empty eloquence is no better than 
a tinkling cymbal or a tin pan which, hollow 
and dead, knows nothing of the sound it may 
give out; while Christ’s love shed abroad in 
the heart, the personal knowledge of salvation, 
wings the preacher’s words with fire, puts 
behind the sound a soul. Love is greater than 


eloquence.” 
27 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


In all probability when Paul said that love 
' was greater than the “tongues” of angels or 
men he had in mind the gift of tongues which 
was one of the charisms most prized in the. 
Corinthian church. The tongues in Corinth 
needed interpretation. They seemed to the 
uninitiate a mere jumble or jargon of sounds. 
They evidently were not any known tongues 
of men; so those who exercised them claimed 
that they were the tongues of angels. It was 
celestial speech with which they were gifted, 
they said; but it surely did not suggest the 
harmony of heaven. When many were speak- 
ing at once-they produced a discord like that 
of a blacksmith shop or a metal-worker’s estab- 
lishment, filled with sounding brass and clang- 
ing cymbals. 

The cymbal is a shallow disc, capable of 
making only a harsh and clanging sound. It 
cannot vary its tone in order to get into har- 
mony with any other instruments in an 
orchestra; but it can make itself heard in any 
din and it can drown out other sounds with 
its clanging. Paul makes it a symbol of the 
hollow and shallow and pretentious loud 
talker who is noisy enough to drown out all 
opposition but who is all sound and fury, sig- 
nifying nothing. 

The Corinthians esteemed the gift of 

28 


CLIMBING THE TRAIL 


tongues very highly. They thought it was 
pure gold. Paul suggests that it is only sound- 
ing brass. Did they think they were Chry- 
sostoms? They were not men of “golden 
mouths’ but simply men of brazen throats. 
They might be very fluent and very loud, but 
they might have very little to say and no very 
good reason for saying it. It took patience 
and mental discipline and hard work to say 
things worth saying; but the gift of tongues 
fell upon those who were nervously unbal- 
anced and who easily passed into an ecstatic 
state for the purpose of receiving it. It made 
its possessors prominent in the church and 
ministered to their vanity, since they thought 
themselves superior to all without the gift; 
and if in consequence they became arrogant 
and self-assertive, they might display their 
pride and their gift and they might attempt 
to outtalk and outshine their brothers, but 
their babble and their prattle would only give 
others the headache, and their assertion of 
superiority would only give others the heart- 
ache. It would be as nothing without love. 

A preacher to-day may preach like an angel, 
but if he displays bad temper or pride it 
all goes for naught with those who hear. 
Excellency of speech and of wisdom are as 
nothing in comparison with the excellencies 

29 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


of love. Paul proceeds, “Though I have the 
gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, 
and all knowledge, and have not love, I am 
nothing.” 

2. Prophecy. There have been wonderful 
prophets in all history—weather prophets, 
war prophets, prophets of good and prophets 
of evil, men who have prophesied truly, men 
who have seemed to possess a spirit of real 
prophecy, who nevertheless have been utterly 
devoid of the spirit of Christ. John Wesley 
tells us of a man who prophesied the over- 
throw of dynasties and royal lines, unexpected 
and unforeseen tempests and battles and acci- 
dents, and whose prophecies came strangely 
true. The story is so interesting that we will 
give it place here. 

Wesley says: “A little before the con- 
clusion of the late war in Flanders, one 
who came from thence gave us a very 
strange relation. I knew not what judgment 
to form of this; but waited till John Haime 
should come over, of whose veracity I could 
no more doubt than of his understanding. The 
account he gave was this: 

“¢Jonathan Pyrah was a member of our so- 
ciety in Flanders. I knew him some years, 
and knew him to be a man of unblamable char- 


acter. One day he was summoned to appear 
30 


CLIMBING THE TRAIL 


before the board of general officers. One of 
them said: What is this that we hear of you? 
We hear that you are turned prophet, and that 
you foretell the downfall of the bloody house 
of Bourbon, and the haughty house of Austria. 
We should be glad if you were a real prophet, 
and if your prophecies came true. But what 
sign do you give, to convince us you are so; 
and that your predictions will come to pass? 
He readily answered: Gentlemen, I give you 
a sign: to-morrow at twelve o’clock, you shall 
have such a storm of thunder and lightning, 
as you never had before since you came into 
Flanders. I give you a second sign: as little 
as any of you expect any such thing, as little 
appearance of it as there is now, you shall 
have a general engagement with the French 
within three days. I give you a third sign: I 
shall be ordered to advance in the first line. 
If I am a false prophet, I shall be shot dead at 
the first discharge. But if I am a true 
prophet, I shall only receive a musket ball in 
the calf of my left leg. 

““At twelve the next day there was such 
thunder and lightning as they never had be- 
fore in Flanders. On the third day, contrary 
to all expectation, was the general battle of 
Fontenoy. He was ordered to advance in the 


first line; and at the very first discharge he 
31 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


did receive a musket ball in the calf of bis left 
leg.’ 99 | 

Wesley adds: “All this profited him noth- 
ing, either for temporal or eternal happiness. 

It quite turned his brain. In a little 
time he ran stark mad. And so he continued 
to the day of his death.” 

Balaam, the son of Beor, had a gift of true 
prophecy; but he was a lover of gold more 
than of God, and he was slain by the sword of 
Israel. 

3. Knowledge. There have been men who 
understood all mysteries and all knowledge, 
men of marvelous attainments in the sciences 
and arts, men who in their study of created 
things have lost all sight of the creating God; 
and Paul says they are as nothing in com- 
parison. Voltaire may have known more than 
most men; but it were better to be the most 
humble Christian on the continent of Europe 
than to have been Voltaire at the height of his 
fame. “If a choice were necessary between 
the two, I would rather have Christian love 
than encyclopedic knowledge, or prophetic in- 
sight, or the understanding of all mysteries.” 
That is.what we understand Paul to say at 
this point. 

The highest knowledge is impossible with- 


out love. Jean Ingelow says rightly, 
32 


CLIMBING THE TRAIL 


“Learn that to love is the one way to know 
Or God or man. It is not love received 
That maketh man to know the inner life 
Of them that love him; his own love bestowed 
Shall do it.” 

4, Faith. Paul leads us one step further. 
“Tf [ have all faith, so as to remove mountains, 
but have not love, 1 am nothing.” Here is one 
of the surprises of this chapter. If a higher 
critic had discovered this passage and knew 
only that it had come from the New Testa- 
ment but nothing at all about its context, he 
surely would have said: “This sentence must 
have been written by the apostle John, for he 
was the apostle of love among the New Testa- 
ment writers; and it probably was written as 
a protest against the apostle Paul’s over- 
emphasis upon the value of faith. Asa rebuke 
to Paul, John asserts that if he or any man 
has faith enough to remove mountains but has 
not love, he counts for nothing in Christian 
experience or the Christian Church.” Such 
a higher critic might found a whole new school 
of theological views upon this opposition and 
antagonism between the two apostles Paul 
and John, even as the Tiibingen School was 
founded upon the supposed antagonism be- 
tween Peter and Paul. How surprising it 
would be to such a critic to find that this sen- 


tence had been written by Paul himself! 
33 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


It is the Apostle of Faith who says that 
faith is as nothing in comparison with love, 
and even the greatest faith which removes 
mountains is valueless without love. The 
Jews called certain of their rabbis “removers 
of mountains” because of their great skill in 
removing mountains of obscurity and diffi- 
culty in their interpretations of the Scripture. 
Jesus had taken that title and applied it not 
to men of great learning and profound scholar- 
ship but to men of great faith in God who 
might see difficulties overcome and the im- 
possible accomplished because they believed 
that they received their petitions when they 
prayed. Now Paul, recalling the title which 
he had heard in Gamaliel’s school and the 
Lord’s application of it to men of faith, makes 
this most astonishing statement that moun- 
tain-removing faith, like mountain-removing 
scholarship, is null and void without the sav- 
ing grace of love. 

Does faith save? No; only faith working 
by love. Does adherence to a creed guarantee 
salvation? No; there must be conduct con- 
sonant with the creed. Does orthodoxy avail 
to keep a man in the Kingdom? No; even 
devils believe and tremble, knowing that love- 
less orthodoxy has no power to save. Men 


have fought like devils to put an end to war, 
34 


CLIMBING THE TRAIL 


and they have hated each other and hurt each 
other and persecuted and killed their brethren 
in the name of the God of love and the Prince 
of Peace. They seemed to do it in all sin- 
cerity. They verily believed that they were 
doing God’s service, even as Paul had believed 
that he was the servant of God in persecuting 
the Christian Church. Paul knew better when 
he wrote this letter. He knew then that dog- 
matism and cruelty and persecution and mur- 
der might prove one’s faithfulness to one’s 
faith or creed, but it at the same time proved 
one’s unfaithfulness to the first and great com- 
mandment of God and the primary principle 
of the Christian Church. Without love, faith 
can become fiendish. 


Has history any better example than that ~~ 


of King Philip II of Spain? He was a sincere 
man. He had great faith in his Catholicism. 
He believed that he was doing God’s service in 
persecuting the Protestant Church. He re- 
moved mountains of opposition and made 
whole districts and lands level with his own 
conception of what was proper and allowable 
in religious belief. When Don Carlos, his 
son, was accused of a crime, the father de- 
clared that he would be like Abraham in his 
obedience to the Lord. He said, “I have 
chosen in this matter to make the sacrifice to 


3D 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


God of my own flesh and blood, and to prefer 
his service and the universal welfare to all 
other human considerations.” He was very 
strict in all his religious observances and as 
faithful as any monk in the performance of his 
religious duties. Yet when he heard of the 
Massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day in 
France he was transported with joy, and we 
are told that he “seemed more delighted than 
with all the good fortune or happy incidents 
which had before occurred to him.” He was 
the very embodiment of faith, and he was a 
fiend in human form. He was as orthodox as 
any man in Europe, and he was as great a 
villain as ever sat upon a throne. He was an 
extreme example of the ferocity of loveless 
faith; but there have been many others less 
conspicuous than he who have had the same 
spirit in like or less degree. 

They have been furiously orthodox and with 
fire and sword they have set about the task 
of bringing others to the level of their own 
faith. With relentless energy they have re- 
moved the mountains which lay in their way 
and they have piled them upon the heads of 
all who ventured to think differently from 
themselves; and if they have crushed out some 
lives in the process and even if the mountains 


have become mountain monumentS over a 
36 


CLIMBING THE TRAIL 


myriad dead they have rejoiced in the triumph 
of their faith, though it be through the loss 
of their love. 

Let all the narrow and intolerant perse- 
cutors for the faith hear what Paul has to say 
at this point: “Your zeal may work wonders. 
It may remove mountains; but across all the 
level plains of your making there shines the 
clear sunlight of God’s truth that hate does 
not come forth from his heart and that mur- 
der is not according to his will, and that love, 
and love alone, represents him and his throne. 
_ All your labor as long as it is without love or 
contrary to love is without him and contrary 
to him. It avails nothing as far as his favor is 
concerned. When you come to stand before 
his judgment seat you will not be asked 
whether you believed this or that and whether 
you fought valiantly for your faith. You will 
be asked only whether your lives were filled 
with works of mercy and love. Did you love 
God and did you love your brothers? If you 
did not, your faith will avail you nothing be- 
fore him. Even though it be miracle-working, 
mountain-removing faith, it is nothing with- 
out love.” 

Judas Iscariot as one of the twelve apostles 
went out on that first mission, and he did 


many wonderful works with the others. The 
37 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


sick were healed, the lepers were cleansed, the 
dead were raised, the devils were cast out, 
mountains of prejudice were removed, moun- 
tains of difficulty were overcome, the way was 
prepared for the kingdom of heaven; and yet 
he came back from that mission Judas Iscariot 
still. In the end it seemed that he would 
rather have thirty pieces of silver than thirty 
years of such Messianic ministry. He lacked 
in love for his Master and for his fellow men. 

James and John loved the Master, and they 
were indignant when the Samaritans proved 
inhospitable to him; and they asked permis- 
sion to call down fire from heaven upon the 
Samaritan village to destroy it. Jesus told 
them they did not know of what spirit they 
were. It might be a spirit of faith, certain of 
the power which could work a_ punitive 
miracle; but it was not a spirit of love. They 
had faith enough to believe that Jesus was 
able to do it; they did not have love enough 
to know that he never would think of doing it. 

In the Great Sermon Jesus declared : “Many 
will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, did 
we do not cast out demons? and in thy name do 
many wonderful works? And then will I pro- 
fess unto them, [ never knew you; depart from 
me, ye that work iniquity.” It may be that 


1 Matt. 7. 22, 23. 
38 


CLIMBING THE TRAIL 


many a modern pastor and evangelist is satis- 
fying his own conscience with the fact that 
he is successful in making converts and build- 
ing up the membership of the church, even 
while he knows that he is selfish at heart and 
far from Christlike in his personal and _ pri- 
vate life. Any degree of success in wonder- 
working is no guarantee of personal salvation. 
A faith which removes mountains may be 
devoid of the saving grace of perfect love. Any 
amount of fundamentalist fervor may be com- 
patible with a woeful lack of brotherly affec- 
tion in the bonds of peace. 

». Charity. Paul leads us higher by an- 
other step. ‘Though I bestow all my goods to 
feed the poor, and have not love, it profiteth 
me nothing.” A man may be a world-famed 
philanthropist, he may found great benevo- 
lent institutions, hospitals, asylums, and uni- 
versities; and if in his benevolence he 
simply is building his own monument and 
burning incense to his own name, all of it 
will be unacceptable to God. If the money 
with which he does these things is blood 
money, tainted money, money gotten by un- 
fair methods, by forcing all competitors out 
of the field or by sweating his employees, or 
money gained by unrighteous occupations, 
manufacturing war munitions or whisky or 

39 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


the implements of vice, his philanthropies are 
doubly unacceptable to God. 

We are told that Jesus looked upon the 
rich young man and loved him. If the rich 
young man had looked upon Jesus and loved 
him, he would have been accepted as a disci- 
ple at once; but-he wanted to inherit the king- 
dom by obeying the other commandments and 
leaving out the primary love to God which 
would eventuate in genuine love for man. 
Jesus gave him the test of wholesale philan- 
thropy just to show him that he lacked in the 
love which would make it possible and give 
it any value in the sight of God. Had the 
young man sold all he had and given his great 
possessions to the poor, that would not have 
saved him. That was only half of the Master’s 
command to him. It still would have been 
necessary to prove that his philanthropy was 
rightly motived by a hearty and unhesitating 
following of Jesus in the devotion of love. | 

There is so much giving which does not 
have the right motive. Tammany Hall is 
said to be a great charitable institution; but 
when its politicians take care of the poor they 
do it partly or principally to maintain a polit- 
ical party, to court popularity, and to cap- 
ture votes. There are Welfare Departments 


in connection with great corporations which 
40 


CLIMBING THE TRAIL 


have many philanthropic and benevolent fea- 
tures and which cost the proprietors a great 
deal of money; but they sometimes lie under 
the suspicion that they are maintained at 
great expense simply to keep the working 
people contented with the manifest injustice 
and inequalities of their lot in their industrial 
dependence and to pacify the rising tide of 
discontent in their ranks. 

A man may give to a beggar just to be rid 
of his importunity, or to a civic or church 
enterprise just because others are giving and 
it would be something of a disgrace to be left 
off the subscription list; and he may give gen- 
erously because of the reputation it will give 
him in the community. There is a great deal 
of sounding of trumpets in connection with 
almsgiving in our day as well as in the days of 
the Lord. Charity bazaars and charity balls 
and charity circuses too often minister more 
to personal vanity and social frivolities than 
to any real sympathy with a brother’s need. 

Paul was taking up a collection for the 
needy Jews in Jerusalem and he was asking 
the Corinthians to subscribe and to give liber- 
ally to that end, but he warns them at the 
same time that the only constraining motive 
in their giving ought to be the motive of Chris- 


tian love. They might give twice as much as 
41 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


Zaccheus gave and as much as Jesus asked the 
young ruler to give and be no better off as far 
as their standing in the Kingdom was con- 
cerned, if they gave without love. 

6. Martyrdom. Paul presses on to the 
heights. He says, “Though I give my body to 
be burned, and-have not love, it profiteth me 
nothing.” Is it possible that a man would 
suffer martyrdom for any other reason than 
uncalculating devotion to the right and the 
good? Could a man go to the stake and 
cherish hatred on the way? There is that old 
story in the early ages of church history of 
the presbyter who was on the way to his death 
as a confessor of the faith, and to whom an- 
other Christian came with whom he had 
quarreled and the brother Christian asked for 
his forgiveness before he died. The presbyter 
refused to listen to his earnest pleading. We 
are not surprised therefore to read that when 
they came to the place of execution the unfor- 
giving presbyter faltered and finally denied 
the Lord while the other who had been asking 
forgiveness in vain took his place. He could 
face death without flinching. He could go 
into the Master’s presence with the palms of 
martyrdom and with the assurance of his per- 
fect love. Martyrdom without love would not 


admit to heaven. 
42 


CLIMBING THE TRAIL 


There might be such a thing as martyrdom 
because of self-love. Strabo tells us of Zar- 
manochegas, a Hindu who had himself burned 
at Athens during the reign of Augustus; and 
then a magnificent tomb was erected over his 
ashes with a pompous inscription upon it to 
the effect that he had immortalized himself. 
He had immolated himself, in the hope that 
he might immortalize himself in that osten- 
tatious way. Paul says that he was profited 
nothing by this extremity of self-sacrifice in 
extreme self-exaltation. 

Paul had read the inscriptions on various 
monuments in Athens and he doubtless had 
read this one: “Here lies Zarmanochegas, the 
Indian from Bargosa, who after the fashion 
of his Indian forefathers made himself im- 
mortal.” This man was a devotee and fanatic 
who had made a public display of his zeal for 
his religion, and after advertisement of his 
purpose and in the presence of a vast mul- 
titude of people and with a smile upon his 
face had leaped into the flames of the funeral 
pyre. The affair had made quite an im- 
pression throughout the Roman Empire, and 
Josephus tells us that one of the Jewish out- 
Jaws, when his band was hard pressed by the 
Romans, exhorted them to self-destruction 


according to the example of Zarmanochegas. 
43 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


Many applauded at the time and the name and 
fame of Zarmanochegas were carried from end 
to end of the Empire and made their way into 
the pages of Strabo and Josephus. We recall 
them to-day. In a sense the Hindu fakir 
has become immortal, but he is remembered as 
a fanatic and a fool. It is the immortality of 
folly to which he has attained. 

See the ascent through which Paul has led 
us. He began with eloquence and then led us 
upward into prophecy and onward into knowl- 
edge and onward and upward into faith, good 
works, and suffering even unto martyrdom. 
These are unusual heights of human attain- 
ment and excellence; but Paul has led us so 
far to point out to us that Christian love 
towers high above all these, is necessary to 
give them value and make them worth the 
while. They are great, but Love is greater 
than them all. The ecstatic talker with 
tongues, the prophetic seer, the profound sage, 
the hero of faith, the unfailing philanthropist, 
and the unfaltering fanatic, sacrificing prop- 
erty and life to the cause, have all been passed 
in review, and now Paul says to them: 
“Orator, prophet, scholar, sage, believer, 
philanthropist, martyr, you are nothing unless 
you are lover too. Love is worth more than 


all your graces and gifts.” 
44 


CLIMBING THE TRAIL 


IX. Tur NATURE or LOVE 


Paul proceeds next to prove the greater ex- 
cellence of love by introducing us to its nature 
which he describes in detail: “Love suffereth 
long, and is kind; love envieth not; love 
vyaunteth not itself, is not puffed up; doth 
not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not its 
own, is not provoked into any paroxysm, 
thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but 
rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, be- 
lieveth all things, hopeth all things, endureth 
all things.” It is a description characterized 
by simplicity and sublimity combined. It is 
so plain in its appearance that we scarcely 
realize its grandeur, until we remember how 
perfect a description it is of the greatest man. 
Substitute for the word “love’ the name 
“Jesus,” and we have a perfect description of 
the disposition and character of our Lord. 

1. Manifest in the Character of Jesus. 
Jesus suffered long, and was kind. Jesus 
envied not. Jesus vaunted not himself, was 
not puffed up. Jesus did not behave himself 
unseemly, sought not his own, never was pro- 
voked into the loss of his self-control. He took 
no account of evil, rejoiced not in unrighteous- 
ness, but rejoiced with the truth. He bore all 
things, believed all things, hoped all things, 

45 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


endured all things. How true all of that was 
of Jesus! In him we find the perfect example 
of Christian love. It is as though Paul had 
taken Jesus for his model and had noted down 
the characteristics of his disposition and char- 
acter and thus had formed his picture of Per- 
fect Love. The apostle John has told us God 
is love. Jesus was the manifestation of the 
Father to men. He said, “He that hath seen 
me hath seen the Father.” His life, then, 
would reproduce fully the love which was the 
essential being of God. His life was the in- 
carnation and human realization of all the 
characteristics of love which Paul has put 
into this picture. Love is greatest, because in 
the human life of Jesus it showed itself so 
essentially divine. 

It is love which begets love. We love Jesus 
because of his perfect love. He had all those 
other gifts which Paul has mentioned, all the 
other graces of Christian character; but he 
never would have been the perfect Saviour to 
us if it had not been that perfect love for us 
constrained him to the exercise of all these 
gifts and graces. 

2. Manifest in the Use of His Gifts. He 
spake as never man spake before him. His 
words were gracious words and words of 


power. He spake with the tongues of men and 
46 


aw 


CLIMBING THE TRAIL 


of angels, even as the Son of God, ambassador 
from heaven’s throne; but all his words of in- 
struction, exhortation, warning, supplication 
were words of love. It was his love for the 
race which constrained him to speak; and 
every uttered syllable sounded forth his soul 
of love. He had the gift of prophecy. He 
was given to understand some of the mysteries 
of the world beyond and of the life to come. 
He drew aside the veil and told us of the last 
things, the resurrection and the Judgment 
and the new heaven and the new earth in 
which righteousness would reign. 

In him were hid all the treasures of wisdom 
and knowledge. He had faith, not the faith 
as of a mustard seed which could remove 
mountains, but the perfect faith of the Sin- 
less Son which could move heaven and earth, 
bring them together, and make them one. He 
lived a life of Christian communism, sharing 
all his goods with the poor. At last he gave 
his body to be crucified upon a tree. Herein 
he commended his love to us that while we 
were yet sinners he died for us. In all his 
prophecy and revelation of mysteries and im- 
partation of wisdom, the philanthropy of his 
life and the sacrifice of his death, it was love, 
and love alone, which led him to these things; 


and above all these things it is the love which 
47 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


inspired him to them which attracts the world 
to his feet to-day. 


X. THE ETERNITY OF LOVE 


Paul next declares that Love is greater be- 
cause it is most enduring. “Love never fail- 
eth; but whether there be prophecies, they 
shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall 
cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall 
vanish away. For we know in part, and we 
prophesy in part. But when that which is 
perfect is come, then that which is in part 
shall be done away.” The Old Testament 
prophets have been replaced by the New Testa- 
ment preachers. The gifts of tongues as the 
early church had them were revived for a 
season by the Irvingites in England and by 
others since their day, only to prove the more 
clearly that they belonged to the past child- 
hood of the faith. 

The knowledge of the ancients has vanished 
away. Monro Gibson, of London, has said: 
“Imagine, if you can, a conversation between 
Pliny the elder and Professor Huxley on 
biology. The great naturalist of the first cen- 
tury would have to go to school for twenty 
years before he was ready to begin a conversa- 


tion with Professor Huxley. His knowledge. 
48 


CLIMBING THE TRAIL 


vast as it seemed in his time, would be two 
thousand years out of date to-day. But would 
the apostle Paul have to go to school for 
twenty years before he could begin to talk 
with an advanced Christian of the twentieth 
century on faith and hope and love? Not at 
all. Paul could begin the minute he arrived.” 
What is true to-day of the knowledge of two 
thousand years ago will be equally true of our 
knowledge two thousand years from this date. 

In his lecture room in Stanford University 
we heard President Jordan tell how badly be- 
hind the times both Darwin and Spencer had 
come to be in some of their hypotheses; and 
in a few centuries Darwin and Spencer and 
Professor Huxley and President Jordan will 
be as badly out of date as Pliny the elder is 
to-day. We know in part, and our knowledge 
soon becomes obsolete and vanishes away. 
What has become of the work of the great uni- 
versities of the Middle Ages? The Scholastics, 
as we call them, piled up gigantic tomes upon 
tomes, which were supposed to represent all 
knowledge possible to the human mind. They 
either have passed out of existence now, or in 
our great libraries the dust has gathered thick 
upon them; for they are archeological curi- 
osities and nothing more to-day. 


The time will come when faith will have 
49 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


been turned into sight, and hope will have 
become realization. Our present faith and 
hope in that sense will cease, but love lives 
on forever. It is the greatest force in the uni- 
verse, greatest because most enduring, the 
Force behind and above all other forces. It 
is greater than physical force and greater 
than intellectual force. It flows from the 
heart and represents the essential being of 
God. As Browning said, 

“There is no good of life but love—but love! 

What else looks good is some shade flung from love; 

Love gilds it, gives it worth.” 
Paul has shown us that it is greatest in com- 
parison with all other gifts and graces, great- 
est because it most perfectly reproduces the 
nature Divine, and greatest because it will 
outlast all these other things. Perfect love 
is eternal, and he who possesses it has the 
assurance of his own immortality. Now that 
we have climbed the trail with Paul to this 
broad and sunny tableland of the highest 
height of Christian experience we will look 
about us a little more carefully until we real- 
ize the beauty of the landscape as we study the 
various features of it and begin to compre- 
hend something of the harmony and suffi- 
ciency of the whole. 


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CHAPTER I 


LOVE’S LONG-SUFFERING AND 
KINDNESS 


In the clauses in which Paul gives his de- 
scription of love he sets before the Corinthian 
church his ideal of Christian character. The 
members of that church were to incorporate 
this ideal. They were to incarnate the spirit 
of Jesus. It will be worth while to study in 
detail this Pauline ideal of Christian love. 
His first statement concerning it is the 
affirmation that “Love suffereth long, and is 
kind.” 


I. Lone TEMPER 


‘'H adyarn paxpoOvuei, Love is long-tempered, 
Paul says. We speak of sweet-tempered and 
quick-tempered and _ short-tempered people, 
but we do not speak of long-tempered ones. 
We have no exact equivalent in English for 
this Greek word. It is the opposite of short- 
tempered. Paul in using this word meant to 
say that love would not fly to pieces at the 
first provocation. It would preserve its 
placidity a long, long time. We heard a sister 
at a camp meeting tell about the sugar-making 


in the maple grove in the early spring. She 
53 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


said that when the black kettles first were 
filled with the maple sap the surface of the 
unstable liquid could be ruffled by the slight- 
est breeze but there came a time in the process 
when the maple syrup became too dense to be 
ruffled by any breeze, however violent, and it 
presented a placid surface in the midst of the 
storm. Then she likened her own experience 
to that dense sweetness, and she said it never 
was ruffled in any winds of temptation or any 
storms of adversity. Her love endured all 
things without losing its sweetness or its 
placidity. If she reported her experience cor- 
rectly, she must have been a long-tempered 
woman. 

There is a tale in the sayings of Suleiman 
the Small to this effect: The Great Sheikh of 
Kahiri listened to evil concerning the Little 
Sheikh of Gheeza. When they met the Great 
Sheikh spoke with abundant abuse. The 
Little Sheikh simply bowed and said, “God 
and I can wait.” His temper did not snap 
under the unexpected and undeserved attack. 
He did not break out into any violent action 
or any unadvised speech. He was a long- 
tempered man. 

The Greek historians have preserved this 
tradition concerning Pericles: One day he was 


attacked on the public street with a torrent 
54 


LOVE’S LONG-SUFFERING 


of abuse, and the enraged person continued 
his tirade until it became dark before he had 
exhausted his spleen. When he finally paused 
Pericles said quietly to his servant, “Bring a 
lamp now and light him home.” Pericles was 
a long-tempered man and a great statesman. 
The Greeks regarded him as the consummate 
flower of the Greek culture and life. 

Susannah Wesley was the mother of many 
children and not one of them was born a saint. 
At one time her husband said to her, “That 
is the twentieth time you have told that thing 
to that child; why do you repeat it twenty 
times?” Susannah Wesley replied, ‘Because 
nineteen times are not sufficient.” Susannah 
Wesley was a long-tempered woman. There 
are such women and there are such men. If 
any one says, “I cannot be that way,” Paul 
says, “Love can.” 

Susannah Wesley must have been such a 
woman as Lowell described in his verse, when 
he said, 


“Cloudless forever is her brow serene, 

Speaking calm hope and trust within her, whence 
Welleth a noiseless spring of patience, 

That keepeth all her life so fresh, so green, 

And full of holiness—that every look, 
The greatness of her woman’s soul revealing, 
Unto me bringeth blessing, and a feeling 

As when I read in God’s own holy Book.” 

55 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


John Wesley was the son of Susannah Wes- 
ley, and he wrote, “Let thy love be long-suffer- 
ing and patient. . . . Let it be kind, soft, 
benign; inspiring thee with the most amiable 
sweetness and the most fervent and tender 
affection. . . . In love, cover all things, 
hope all things, and endure all things, 
not some, not many things only; not most, but 
absolutely all things. . . . Call nothing in- 
tolerable; never say of anything, ‘It is not to 
be borne.’ Love is proof against all. Love 
triumphs over all.” 

Philo called patience the queen of the vir- 
tues. It is so much easier to fight than it is 
‘to keep one’s temper. It is so much easier to 
relieve oneself in violent speech and action 
than it is to be patient and endure. The peo- 
ple who can do great and valiant deeds far 
outnumber those who can bear great wrongs. 
There are many great soldiers where there 
are few saints. Faith stops the mouths of 
lions, quenches the power of fire, waxes 
mighty in war, turns to flight armies of aliens. 
Faith does all of that, and it is easy enough 
for some people to have the faith which will 
do all of that. Love suffers long, and is kind; 
and that is quite a different thing. Most peo- 
ple do not find it so easy to do that. 


56 


LOVE’S LONG-SUFFERING 


II. KINDNESS 


Love suffers long, paxpoO@vyei, and Love is 
kind, ypnoreverat. It is necessary to look at the 
words which Paul used to be sure of his mean- 
ing. These two words are joined again and 
again in Paul’s writings. In the Epistle to the 
Galatians Paul essays to give the component 
elements of the one fruit of the Spirit, and 
in making the list he begins with “love, joy, 
peace,” and then immediately he adds, “long- 
suffering and kindness,” wpaxpoOvuia and 
xenotérns.! In the Epistle to the Romans Paul 
mentions these two attributes together as 
characteristic of God’s treatment of the sin- 
ning race, “Dost thou despise the wealth of his 
kindness, ypyorétntos, and forbearance and 
long-suffering, puaxpoOvuias?”’? In the Second 
Epistle to the Corinthians Paul declares that 
he and his fellow workers have commended 
their ministry as the servants of God in many 
ways and, among others, in “long-suffering, 
‘sv paxpoOupia, in kindness, ‘ev ypyorérnte.’’*® In 
the Epistle to the Colossians toward the close 
of his ministry Paul still exhorts all Chris- 
tians to put on, as the elect of God, holy and 
beloved, “kindness, ypnorérnra, and long-suffer- 
~1Gal. 5. 22. 

2 Rom. 2. 4. 


82 Cor. 6. 6. 
57 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


ing, paxpoOviay,”’* The two go together and 
they are characteristics both of God and of 
Christ the revealer of God. 

Jesus said, “Take my yoke upon you and 
learn from me, because I am meek and lowly 
in heart, and you shall find rest to your souls; 
for my yoke is a kindly one, ypyords.” It had 
no rough edges. It never galled. Jesus had 
made yokes there in the carpenter’s shop at 
Nazareth and he had seen to it that no yoke 
went out of his hands until it had been 
smoothed to the last possible degree. He had 
too much compassion for the dumb, driven 
cattle of those Galilean plains and hills to 
allow any portion of his handiwork to add a 
particle to their discomfort and their pain. 
Would he not be just as compassionate and 
as kindly to those poor people who became his 
disciples and followed with him? If they took 
his yoke upon them, they would find it a 
kindly one. ‘The kindliness of Jesus was 
simply a revelation of the kindliness of God. 
Peter wrote in his epistle that all that the 
Christians needed to do was to taste and see 
for themselves that God was a kindly God, 


“oTt ypnotos ‘o Kvplos.’’6 





* Col. 3. 12. 
° Matt. 11. 29, 30. 
61 Pet. 2. 3. 
58 


LOVE’S LONG-SUFFERING 


Long-suffering and kindness are attributes 
of God and were characteristics of Jesus. 
Paul appropriates them here to his deserip- 
tion of Christian love, and we may be sure 
that he regards them not as natural gifts but 
only as gifts of grace. They come from God 
and make man Godlike and Christlike in char- 
acter. 


Til. Girts oF GRACE 


1. Not temperamental. There are people 
whose long-suffering is merely a matter of 
temperament. One man is born into this 
world with a sanguinary temperament, and 
the inside of him is all fire and flame, and his 
spirit is continually in motion, and his heart 
like a Vesuvius within him is always trem- 
bling as with earthquake shock or else in vio- 
lent eruption. It is natural for such a man 
always to be impatient. On the other hand a 
man may be born into this world with a 
phlegmatic temperament, and his heart 
naturally will be as quiet as a millpond, and 
in the worst circumstances with most admir- 
able patience and most enviable long-suffer- 
ing he will be ready to fold his hands and 
say, “Let everything alone; it will all come 
right in the end.” 


The patience which is a matter of tempera- 
59 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


ment is the patience of the donkey who meekly 
ducks his head under the severest shower of 
blows and refuses to make any faster time in 
spite of all beating and urging, but suffers 
these things long and is still gentle-spirited 
and kind because these things are all a matter 
of course to him; for through centuries of ill 
treatment he has come into hereditary expec- 
tation of nothing better than these. Such 
patience has no consideration here. It never 
entered Paul’s thought. 

2. Not stoical. There are people whose 
long-suffering is a matter of schooling or of 
philosophy. The red Indian of America 
thought it was unmanly to display any emo- 
tion either in fortune or misfortune; and his 
impassive countenance might have been mis- 
taken for an illustration of the long-suffering 
of love. The old Stoics of Rome sought to 
show themselves superior to all the flings of 
fortune and all the chances of life; and by 
strength of their human will they bade defi- 
ance to fate. 

Quintus Fabius Maximus was busied with 
the affairs of state, and they brought him 
word that his wife whom he dearly loved had 
been killed under a fallen house, and im- 
mediately another messenger brought the 


news that his younger son, upon whom he had 
60 


LOVE’S LONG-SUFFERING 


set all the hopes of his heart, had died in 
Umbria. Quintus Fabius Maximus never 
changed countenance, the old chroniclers tell 
us, but went calmly on with his administra- 
tion of the affairs of the state as if no calamity 
had befallen him. Such Stoicism is as far 
removed from Paulinism as darkness from 
light. Such external expression of long-suf- 
fering may cover an internally cold and 
eternally despairing heart. 

The long-suffering which arises from real 
or assumed indifference to all earthly things 
is sottish insensibility. The long-suffering 
which arises from a donkeylike disposition to 
let things go as they will because things 
always have gone so and even the worst things 
some time will have an end is the long-suffer- 
ing of laziness or of the beast and is unworthy 
of a man, endowed with reason and freedom. 
The long-suffering of love has nothing to do 
with long-suffering of this sort. 

3. Not mechanical. There are people whose 
kindness is mechanical. We have seen school- 
teachers, and especially kindergarten school- 
teachers, who thought that it was a part of 
their professional duty to be pleasant with 
the children; and we have seen shopgirls, 
clerks in department stores and similar estab- 


lishments, who thought that it was a part of 
61 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


their business equipment always to present a 
pleasant countenance to every customer; and 
we have seen these people turn on a smile just 
as you would turn on an electric light. One 
moment their countenance would be as blank 
as the glass globe about the electric wire, and 
then by a turn_of the inner mechanism a smile 
would come flashing, just as when you pressed 
the button the electric light would flash out; 
and the effect was as mechanical in the one 
case as in the other. 

4. Not calculated. There are people whose 
kindness always is calculated, and for the 
display of it they always expect an equal or a 
larger return. Their kindness is like that of 
Cicero, who said, “Kindness must not be shown 
to a young man, nor to an old man; not to the 
old man, because he is likely to die before he 
can have an occasion to repay the benefit; and 
not to a young man, because he is sure to for- 
get it.” Cicero’s kindness then, limited to the 
middle aged who would be likely to have 
ample opportunity to pay back all they re- 
ceived with interest, may be kindness indeed 
to the recipient but on the part of the giver 
it is self-evident selfishness. 

The long-suffering and kindness mentioned 
here are twin streams from one source, but 
that source is radically different from any we 


62 


LOVE’S LONG-SUFFERING 


have as yet suggested. Paul says that genuine 
long-suffering and kindness, independent of 
temperament and independent of circum- 
stance, spring from Christian love. Love 
suffers long and is kind, and love never fails. 
Love’s gifts and graces are compatible with 
any degree of energy and with every form of 
activity. Anyone can have them in any con- 
dition of life; but they are flowers which do 
not grow wild in any man’s garden. They are 
blossoms from the heavenly paradise, and they 
are plucked with the two hands of prayer and 
of faith. They are not natural gifts. They 
are gifts of grace. We need to look, then, for 
men whom God has called and whom he has 
richly gifted with his grace to find the best 
examples of that love which suffers long and 
is kind. The Bible is full of illustrations. 


1V. BreteE EXAMPLES 


1. Noah found grace in the sight of God; 
and God told him to build an ark. For days 
and for weeks and for months and for years he 
hammered away, and the people laughed at 
him and told him he was crazy; but he never 
quit his work except to preach to them re- 
pentance and consequent salvation. He was 


a carpenter, and the apostle Peter tells us 
63 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


that he was a preacher of righteousness. In 
these respects he was like Jesus, the carpenter 
evangelist, and he was like Jesus too in his 
long-suffering kindness; for the more the peo- 
ple jeered the more patiently he labored and 
preached. Yet he made no impression upon 
their hardened-hearts. He suffered long with 
them and was kind to them to the very end, 
but half an hour before the flood came he 
could have sold the ark to them for kindling 
wood and that was the only use they would 
have made of it. According to the story, Noah 
endured the contradiction of sinners against 
himself for six hundred years with all kind- 
ness of heart. and patience of soul. Then he 
went into the ark with all his family and the 
door was shut; and there was no further use 
for kindling wood in that vicinity while the 
ark proved itself to be otherwise handy. 

2. Job’s patience was tried with business 
losses, bereavement, and suffering, but the 
Book says that he was perfect and upright, 
fearing God and eschewing evil. When the 
Sabeans had stolen his oxen and the Chal- 
deans had carried away his camels and a 
cyclone had slain his seven sons and three 
daughters, the long-suffering and patience of 
Job was such that he sinned not nor charged 


God foolishly; but, sitting down amid the 
64 


LOVE’S LONG-SUFFERING 


ruins of all his earthly happiness, Job said 
without bitterness and in all kindliness of 
spirit and submission of soul, “The Lord gave 
and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the 
name of the Lord.” 

3. Moses was the meekest man, and we read 
of him that “Moses was tried above all the 
men which were upon the face of the earth.” 
He was an active spirit, but the Lord tried 
him by sending him out for forty years into 
the wilderness to feed sheep. Sheep are most 
unreasonable creatures. Sometimes they seem 
to have no sense at all. Moses suffered long 
with them and learned to be kind to them 
even when their stupidity exasperated him 
most. Then for forty years God made him the 
leader of the people of Israel, and Moses found 
them more unreasonable and unmanageable 
than any flock of sheep ever pretended to be. 
If any man ever was tempted to lose his tem- 
per, it was Moses. If any man ever had his 
patience tried, it was Moses. He had done 
everything imaginable for the people, and they 
ought to have followed him without a ques- 
tion wherever he might choose to lead; but 
instead of this they grumbled and grumbled, 
complained and complained, rebelled and re- 
belled. Now they wanted water, and now 


manna, and now meat, and now the onions 
65 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


and leeks of Egypt, and now the golden calf 
of the heathen worship. Moses bore with 
them, suffered long with them and was kind. 
If he had not been one of the most patient men 
who ever lived he could not have done it. One 
time, and one time only, we are told that his 
patience failed under the heavy strain. 

4. The apostle James tells us, “Take the 
prophets who have spoken in the name of the 
Lord for an example of suffering affliction, and 
of patience.”* See how in all their difficulties 
and discouragements they never became bitter 
in spirit. See how they suffered long and were 
kind. Elijah was full of zeal, a prophet of 
fire; but the prejudices and the idolatries of 
the people were like icebergs round about him 
and he could not melt them down. He had to 
flee into the wilderness to be fed by the ravens 
and then by a poor widow. He, the man of 
zeal, the prophet of fire, had to be quiet and 
keep himself hidden; for despite all his 
preaching the people worshiped Baal and the 
king worshiped Jezebel. He suffered long and 
was kind, and yet it seemed to him that he 
alone served the Lord. 

5. Isaiah was told at the time of his call 
that the hardened people would not hear nor 
understand, and he preached through the 


7 Jas. 5. 10. 
66 


ON OE 


LOVE’S LONG-SUFFERING 


reigns of four kings and at the end of his long 
ministry he cried, “I have labored in vain; I 
haye spent my strength for nought, and in 
vain; yet surely my work is with my God.’ 

6. Jeremiah is the prophet of lamentation. 
His lifelong lamentation was that the people 
would not heed his warning and be saved. 
They derided him daily. They mocked him 
and defamed him. They imprisoned him and 
put him into the lower pit. They burned the 
roll of his prophecies, and they disobeyed him 
in every command. They carried him bound 
and a prisoner with them to Egypt; and they 
said to him at the same time, “As for the word 
that thou speakest to us in the name of the 
Lord, we will not hearken unto thee.” What 
was true of one was in a large measure true 
of all the ancient prophets. They were 
examples of suffering affliction and of pa- 
tience. They suffered long and kept their 
Spirits sweet, for it was their love to God and 
their love of souls which constrained them to 
all their crucifixion of natural tempers and 
all their sacrifice of self. 


V. EVeRY-DAY EXAMPLES 


1. Love suffereth long and is kind. That is 
true of love alone. Even the most admirable 


8 Isa. 49. 4. ) 





67 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


natural temperament will fail us sometimes. 
Nothing less than the Christian experience of 
love will keep our tempers sweet always. 
Love can do that. Love will do it. See this 
mother whose wayward son long ago has ex- 
hausted the patience of every other member 
of the household. They have said bitter things 
to him, and they have treated him with the 
severity which his conduct deserved; but his 
mother loves him and prays for him and 
pleads with him and speaks kindly to him 
still, even when he knows that he has wrung 
her heart with anguish by his wrongdoing and 
that her strength is fast failing under the 
heavy burden he has put upon her to bear. It 
was Bishop Westcott who said, ““What we can 
do for another is the test of Power; what we 
can suffer for another is the test of Love.’ The 
mother’s love stands the test. When all the 
rest of the world has given the boy up as a 
hopeless case and is ready to turn its back 
upon him in disgust or despair, her love never 
fails. The mother suffers long and is kind, 
and some day a miracle is wrought in her 
behalf. 

The vagabond son wanders into some 
church or some mission or some Salvation 
Army Corps, and listens to the message of the 


forbearance of God and the long-suffering 
68 


LOVE’S LONG-SUFFERING 


kindness of the Saviour of men, and he says to 
himself, “I can believe that is true; for I have 
seen the love of God and the spirit of Christ 
in my mother;” and he accepts the message, 
kneels at the penitent form, stands up a new 
man in the Lord, drops his tobacco and his 
whisky and his opium and his filthy habits and 
his evil associates and lives an honest and 
respectable life in the world. Everybody is 
astonished except that good mother whose 
long-suffering kindness and love had made his 
regeneration possible. We have known such 
cases in our own community; and we have 
been glad at last that Christ’s love and the 
mother’s love, unlike our own, have been will- 
ing to suffer long and be kind. 

2. There is that patient wife who suffers 
and is silent and who smiles in her suffering. 
Through all her husband’s neglect and ill 
treatment she clings to him, is faithful to him, 
loves him still. Her folks say to her: “Leave 
him and come back to your home. We will 
see that you have enough to eat and to wear 
at least.” The neighbors all tell her: “You 
ought to shut the door in his face, and lock 
it too. It would do him good to sleep out of 
doors a few nights, and he does not deserve a 
decent home with you.” The wife says never 


a word. She suffers on and is silent. She 
69 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


suffers long and is kind. Only love will do that. 

3. We have seen men and women of God in 
the city missionary work labor with and for 
the weak and erring ones, lift them to their 
feet, help them into honest employment, give 
them time and attention and words of con- 
stant cheer and encouragement, rejoice that 
they were stable for a few weeks or a few 
months at a time. Then the word would 
come that they had fallen again, gone 
back to the drink or gone back into vice; 
and we have seen those missionaries search 
diligently for the wanderers through all the 
city slums, find them in some den of iniquity 
and in some fathomless depth of despair, 
speak to them kindly, assure them of forgive- — 
ness and the possibility of another attempt at — 
reformation with better result. We have seen 
them do that again and again and again; and 
we never have seen anything else which made 
us so sure that the spirit of Jesus the Good 
Shepherd still was alive in this world, the 
spirit of love which would suffer long and be 
kind. 


VI. THE PATIENCE OF JESUS 


_ The long-suffering and kindness of this 
chapter are those which flow from Christian 


love, such love as the life of Jesus constantly 
70 


LOVE’S LONG-SUFFERING 


showed. How patient he was with every one! 

1. His own nation of the Jews ought to 
have received him with open arms as the 
longed-for Messiah. They ought to have 
heeded his counsel and thus have prepared 
the way for the kingdom of God upon the 
earth; but they rejected his teaching and re- 
fused to believe in his authority. Yet he suf- 
fered long with them; for he loved them to the 
end, and he died for them at the last. 

2. How long-suffering and kindly-spirited 
and patient he was with his disciples! The 
clearest revelations were made to these. The 
Lord had every reason to expect from these 
unswerving faith and implicit obedience and 
unfailing love; but they were so slow of heart 
and so dull of hearing. Even to the end they 
seemed to be incapable of receiving the spir- 
itual conception of the Kingdom he had so 
persistently taught. Yet the Lord always was 
patient with them. He gave them line upon 
line, precept upon precept. He told them 
twenty times, if nineteen were not sufficient ; 
and he forgave them when, after all, they 
showed that though they had been so long 
time with him yet they had not known him. 

3. How patient he always was with the 
publican and the sinner! When the world had 


given them up as irredeemably lost, he said, 
3 71 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


“It is my mission to save you.” When they 
wandered into the far countries of willful 
transgression, he followed them with shep- 
herd faithfulness and with fatherly solicitude 
and care. When everybody else was ready to 
stone them and inflict the full penalty of the 
offended law, he said, “I do not condemn you; 
go, and sin no more.” That was the spirit of 
Jesus, the spirit of love which suffered long 
and was kind. 

Paul knew what the long-suffering of Jesus 
was. Paul called himself the chief of sinners, 
and he said that Christ Jesus had shown forth 
in him all of his long-suffering, tiv dzacav 
paxpoOvpiav,? Paul had persevered in his perse- 
cution of the Christians until he deserved to 
be smitten from the face of the earth, but a 
vision of the nonresisting Christ was granted 
him, asking in all long-suffering, “Why per- 
secutest thou me?” and Paul was won by the 
Patient Sufferer as he never would have been 
by a retaliating and punishing Lord. At the 
end of his own career Paul exhorted Timothy 
to follow the example he had set in all his 
ministry and to reprove, rebuke, and exhort 
with all long-suffering, év don paxpoOupia, 
those who were under his care.*° Paul had 
94 Tim. 1. 16. 


102 Tim. 4. 2. 
72 


LOVE’S LONG-SUFFERING 


learned from Jesus what long-suffering was. 
Let Timothy now learn from him. 

Paul reproduced the spirit of Jesus and 
Jesus represented and revealed to men the 
spirit of the Father. God is love, and that 
means that God is long-suffering. Through 
all world history there has been presented to 
the eyes of the universe the moral scandal of 
Sin and the sufferance of sin. Men have 
sinned against God and against light in every 
age, as they sin against God and against light 
to-day. Sin has deserved death; but sinners 
have sinned on and have reached old age. In 
the forbearance and infinite patience of God 
they have been permitted to prolong their 
days, even in continuous rebellion against the 
God who gave them. 

As Jesus the Saviour was patient, so God 
the Father is patient. He keeps his faith in 
the race. If it is difficult sometimes for men 
to keep their faith in God, how much more 
difficult it must be at all times for God to 
keep his faith in men. He does it! That is 
the miracle of his love. He knoweth our 
frame. He remembereth that we are dust. 
He is full of pity. As a father pitieth his 
children, so he pitieth us. He knoweth our 
divine origin. He remembereth that we are 


made in his own image, and that our spirits 
73 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


never will rest until they find their rest in him. 
He is our Father. We are his children. He 
has faith that the children of God will come 
home. 

If he can be patient under the infinite diffi- 
culties of dealing with the shortcomings of the 
race, we surely ought to be patient with each 
other and with all men. If he has forgiven 
us ten thousand talents, we ought to be will- 
ing and able to forgive a hundred shillings. 
It was Paul’s exhortation to the Ephesians, 
“Become kind, ypyoroit, to each other, com- 
passionate, forgiving each other even as God 
in Christ forgave you. Become therefore imi- 
tators of God.” It is a lofty ideal, that of the 
imitation of God. It is the ideal of the Ser- 
mon on the Mount, in which Jesus told us to 
be perfect even as the Father in heaven is 
perfect. The perfection he demanded was the 
perfection of long-suffering love. 





i Eph. 4. 32—5. 1. 


74 


CHAPTER IT 
LOVE AND ENVY 


PAUL’s description of Love begins with two 
positive statements, “Love suffereth long, and 
is kind.” It is continued with eight negative 
statements. Sometimes we are driven into 
negatives to make positive excellencies more 
vivid by contrast. When Peter would de- 
scribe the Christian’s inheritance he says that 
it is one that is “incorruptible, and undefiled, 
and that fadeth not away.”' Those three 
negatives, without corruption, without defile- 
ment, and without fading beauty and failing 
strength, suggest the purity and eternity of an 
inheritance unlike any which this world 
knows. 

We know so little of heaven. Almost all 
that we feel sure about in our conception of 
it is that it is different from this earth. When 
John attempts to describe it he runs into a 
series of negatives. He tells us that there is 
no sin there and there is no sorrow and all 
tears are wiped away. There is no darkness 
and there is no death. There is no falsehood 
and there is no church. There is no need of a 


11 Pet. 1. 4. 
75 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


temple and there is no need of a sun. God is 
all in all and God is love. So here Paul gives 
us eight consecutive negations concerning love, 
that by contrast its excellence may be made 
more apparent. He tells us that love is 
neither envious, nor pompous, nor egotistical, 
nor ill‘mannered, nor selfish, nor uncon- 
trolled, nor suspicious, nor sympathetic with 
sin. 

We begin with the first of these negative 
statements, “Love is not envious, ‘H dydry ov 
CnAol. 


IT. Envy DESCRIBED 


Envy is devilish, Love is divine. They are 
moral antipodes, wholly inconsistent with 
each other, and absolutely exclusive of each 
other. The statements can be made without 
any qualification or any exception whatever, 
that envy loveth not and love envieth not. 
Water and oil could be mixed more easily than 
envy and love. 

The inherent and ineradicable meanness of 
envy is apparent in its definition. Webster 
defines envy to be “pain, uneasiness, mortifica- 
tion, or discontent excited by the sight of an- 
other’s superiority or success, accompanied 
by some degree of hatred or malignity, and 


often or usually with a desire or an effort to 
76 


LOVE AND ENVY 


depreciate the person, or with pleasure in see- 
ing him depressed.” Can anyone give a better 
description of meanness than that definition 
would make? 

Bacon closes his essay on Envy with this 
sentence: “Envy is the vilest affection, and the 
most depraved; for which cause it is the 
proper attitude of the devil, who is called, 
The envious man, that soweth tares among 
the wheat by night; as it always cometh to 
pass, that Envy worketh subtilely and in the 
dark and to the prejudice of good things, such 
as is the wheat.” 

Burton describes the envious man in this 
language: “‘So often as an envious wretch sees 
another man prosper, to be enriched, to thrive, 
and be fortunate in the world, to get honors, 
offices, or the like, he repines and grieves. He 
tortures himself if his equal, friend, neighbor 
be preferred, commended, do well; if he under- 
stand of it, it galls him afresh; and no greater 
pain can come to him than to hear of another 
man’s well-doing; ’tis a dagger at his heart, 
every such object. He would damage himself 
to do another a mischief; as that rich man in 
Quintillian that poisoned the flowers in his 
garden, so that his neighbor’s bees could get 
no more honey from them. His whole life is 


sorrow, and every word he speaks a satire; 
77 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


nothing makes him fat but other men’s ruins.” 
Chrysostom said, “As a moth gnaws a gar- 
ment, so doth envy consume a man, to be a 
living anatomy, a skeleton, to be a lean and 
pale carcass, quickened with a fiend.” To be 
lean and pale is bad enough; but to be lean 
and pale and then possessed by the devil is 
worse; and that is Chrysostom’s description of 
an envious man. 
Spenser drew his picture of how 
“Malicious Envy rode 
Upon a ravenous wolfe, and still did chaw 
Between his cankred teeth a venemous tode, 
That all the poison ran about his jaw; 


But inwardly he chawéd his own maw 
At neighbor’s wealth that made him ever sad.” 


Milton names envy as one of the Seven 
Deadly Sins and calls it “the eldest born of 
hell.” Ruskin calls our attention to Giotto’s 
spiritual insight in his fresco at Padua, where 
he has painted Envy as an old hag with a 
snake crawling from her lips and then coil- 
ing round to strike her in the forehead. She 
has fingers like claws and she is being con- 
sumed in flames and she is generating her 
own suicidal poison. This is the conception 
of envy which the great poets and artists have 
given us, and it is one from which any sensi- 
tive soul naturally would shrink in horror 


and disgust. 
78 


LOVE AND ENVY 


~~ 


Il. Envy ILLUSTRATED 


One would suppose that if envy were so 
utterly detestable a thing as these masters 
would seem to think it, “the beginning of hell 
in this life, and a passion not to be excused,” 
it would be a very rare occurrence indeed to 
find it -harbored in a human heart; but it is 
one of the most surprising things in connec- 
tion with our race that envy should be so 
natural and universal a complaint as it is. 
From the very beginning the pages of sacred 
and of secular history have been full of it. 
The illustrations throng upon us. On the 
first pages of Genesis they begin. 

1. In the Old Testament. Abel offered a 
more acceptable sacrifice than Cain; and Cain 
was very angry that his brother should be pre- 
ferred before him. Envy soured his visage 
and poisoned his heart and finally crazed him 
with rage, and he rose up against his brother 
and slew him. Esau was the elder son, and so 
deserved the birthright and the blessing. 
Jacob envied him his rightful preference, and 
so he lied to his old, blind father and deceived 
him and supplanted Esau from his place of 
honor. Then Esau hated Jacob and sought 
for his life. Envy will lie and cheat and mur- 


der and do anything else that is bad. 
79 


‘ 
THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


Leah was the mother of four children and 
Rachel had none at all and the record is that 
Rachel envied her sister, and there was con- 
sequent domestic disharmony in the house- 
hold of Jacob for years. Joseph was Jacob’s 
favorite son. He loved him more than all his 
children, because he was the son of his old 
age, and he made him a coat of many colors; 
and when his brethren saw that their father 
loved him more than any or all of them, they 
hated Joseph and they could not speak peace- 
ably unto him. When they had the oppor- 
tunity, if it had not been for Reuben’s inter- 
ference, they would have slain him; and as 
it was, they sold him as a slave into Egypt. 

Jacob had envied his brother, and Jacob’s 
wives envied each other, and Jacob’s sons 
envied their brother and almost broke Jacob’s 
heart. Envy had made him a liar and deceiver 
in the beginning of his life, envy created dis- 
cord in the domestic economy of his middle 
life, and envy deprived him of his favorite son 
and well-nigh brought down his gray hairs 
with sorrow to the grave in his old age. So 
much for the illustrations in Genesis. Other 
books in the Bible are equally full of them. 

We remember how Saul envied David his 
popularity and how he sought to take his life, 


how he threw the javelin at his head, hunted 
80 


LOVE AND ENVY 


him from his court, and exiled him from his 
native land. We remember how Haman had 
such an envious heart that it almost killed him 
to honor his enemy Mordecai as he himself had 
hoped to be honored by putting upon him the 
royal apparel and giving him the king’s horse 
to ride and the king’s crown to wear and lead- 
ing him through the street with the proclama- 
tion that this was the man whom the king de- 
lighted to honor. It surely would have killed 
Haman to have done that over again; but he 
was hanged before he had the chance to make 
the experiment. 

2. In Ancient History. We read in 
Plutarch that Dionysius the tyrant of Syra- 
cuse punished Philoxenus the musician be- 
cause he sang better than the tyrant himself 
could, and Plato the philosopher because the 
philosopher could beat him in an argument. 
We read in Roman history that Adrian the 
emperor was a man of the same stamp. He 
killed all his equals and mortally envied all 
poets, painters, and artificers who seemed to 
excel him in anything. Domitian the emperor 
envied Agricola because, though he was a pri- 
vate citizen, he was of such excellent char- 
acter that he seemed to obscure the emperor’s 
honor and to eclipse the emperor’s fame. 


Cambyses slew his brother Smerdis because 
81 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


the brother could shoot better with bow and 
arrows than he. Caligula slew his brother be- 
cause his brother was the better-looking man. 

Richard of England and Philip of France 
were fellow soldiers in the Holy Land; and 
the Crusaders soon saw that Richard was the 
braver of the two. When they began to look 
to him as the chief, Philip became envious, 
disagreed with all of his plans, finally came to 
open defiance, and at last left Palestine in 
high dudgeon, hastened home, and invaded 
Richard’s territory with public declaration of 
war. 

Theogenes was the prince of Greek 
wrestlers. Another wrestler was so envious 
of him that his whole life was embittered. 
Then Theogenes died and a statue was erected 
to him in a public place, and the tradition is 
that the other wrestler went out every night 
and wrestled with the statue. One night he 
threw it, and it fell on him and crushed him 
to death. He was a big fool, but he was no 
bigger fool than any other envious man. 

Francis had heard that Raphael was the 
prince among painters and he sent to Raphael, 
asking him to send him one of his pictures. 
Raphael complied with the request. Francis 
received the picture, looked at it, recognized 


its inherent worth, fell into a fit of envy and 
82 


LOVE AND ENVY 


died. Envy is not always thus fatal. If it 
were, most of us never would have lived to 
see this day. 

Chrysostom was right when he said, “As a 
moth gnaws a garment, so doth envy consume 
aman.” There was a Roman citizen named 
Mutius who, as everybody knew, had a very 
envious and malignant spirit. One day he ap- 
peared on the streets of Rome looking very 
sad, and Publius said, “Either some great evil 
has happened to Mutius, or some great good to 
somebody else.” 

3. In the New Testament. The Greek verb 
é7ni6w, Which is translated “envieth” in this 
passage, occurs twice in the book of Acts, and 
it is fair to conclude that the idea expressed 
by the verb in these passages in Acts will 
help us to illustrate the thought here. In 
the seventh chapter of Acts we read, “And the 
patriarchs, moved with envy, ¢A@oarvtes, sold 
Joseph into Egypt.’* The verb in the Greek 
is the same we have here. The feeling, then, 
is that of Jacob’s sons toward Joseph. It is 
the feeling which brethren can have toward 
a brother preferred. 

It is the feeling of the elder brother in the 
parable of the prodigal son. What was the 
matter with him, that he would not come in to 


2 Acts 7. 9. 
83 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


the feast? He was angry and stayed outside 
of the house, and when his father went out to 
entreat him to come in he said, “I have be- 
haved myself all my life, and you never made 
a banquet like this for me; but now that this 
scapegrace son has come back, you have killed 
for him the fatted calf.” It was the devil of 
envy in his heart. He would rather go hungry 
and sulk there behind the house than to go in 
and enjoy the good things of the banqueting 
table. He said to himself, “This younger son, 
this spendthrift son who claims to have re- 
formed, is treated better than I am, and I do 
not like it.” 

There was an assembly of ministers at 
Elberfeldt; and someone asked them, “Whom 
does this elder brother represent?’ Krum- 
macher answered: “I know him very well. I 
met him only yesterday.” ‘They asked, “Who 
is he?” and he said solemnly, “Myself.” Then. 
he explained that on the yesterday he had 
heard of a very gracious visitation of God’s 
goodness to a man who it seemed to him was 
very much less worthy of it than he would 
have been; and he felt a deal of envy and irri- 
tation because of it. That was a good appli- 
cation of the parable. 

That pastor who gets vexed because another 


pastor has greater revivals or larger collec- 
84 


LOVE AND ENVY 


tions or better appointments than he has, that 
Sunday-school teacher who gives up the class 
because somebody else seems more popular or 
successful than she is, that committee man 
in the Young People’s Society who will not 
work at all because somebody else seems to be 
getting the credit or more notice at least than 
he does, each of these is harboring that Little, 
mean devil of envy in his heart. It slips into 
the church membership. It shows _ itself 
among brethren of the same congregation and 
denomination oftentimes, and between differ- 
ent denominations it may be even more clearly 
manifest. 

The second instance of the use of this verb 
in the book of Acts illustrates that fact. It is 
to be found in the seventeenth chapter. Paul 
and Silas had been holding a three weeks’ re- 
vival service in Thessalonica, and they had 
had a very successful revival. Many of the 
Jews believed, and of the devout Greeks a 
great multitude, and of the chief women not 
a few. Then we read, “But the Jews which 
believed not, moved with envy, ¢nA@sartes, 
made an uproar.’® They assaulted the house 
the apostles were in, and drove them out of the 
city. We have known other revival services 
broken up, if not in the same manner, at least 


3 Acts 17. 5. 
85 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


from the same motive. The members of the 
congregation of another belief were moved to 
envy and did all they could by speech and 
influence at least to break up proceedings. 

In our hearing the Mountain Evangelist 
made a confession along this line in one of his 
public sermons. He said: “I remember when 
I was a Presbyterian pastor, trying to build 
up my church. The Reformers on the hill 
used to come along and say, ‘We are going to 
have Brother Lord with us for a season.’ 
Brother Lord was a big man down there. I 
hated him in my Christian way. I did not 
like to hear him. He used to say to me, ‘He 
that believeth and is baptized shall be saved,’ 
and then he would look at me with an air of 
triumph. I will not say how I felt. He would 
beat me in argument every time. I did not 
know the meaning of baptism then nor the 
scope of it or anything of the kind, and I 
would just walk off like a beaten dog. When 
they would say they were going to have 
Brother Lord, I would say, ‘Brethren, I hope 
you will have a good time and gather in as 
many as you can,’ and I never told a bigger 
lie in my life. So it was with the Methodists 
and the Baptists. I did not want any of them 
to get anybody. I did not want them to get 


ahead of me. I wanted to get ahead of them; 
86 


ee 


LOVE AND ENVY 


and when they would have a big meeting, I 
would send off and get a popular evangelist 
and manage to keep abreast.” What a hu- 
miliating confession that was! What a con- 
temptible spirit that would have been in any 
preacher! Yet there are churches and 
preachers made on that narrow plan. 

The Lord can deliver from every such thing! 
He to whom authority was given to cast out 
devils can cast out this devil of envy from our 
midst! 

How can that be done? Marcus Aurelius 
said, “I have read Greek, Hebrew, Chaldee 
authors; I have consulted with many wise 
men for a remedy for envy and I could find 
none.’ Marcus Aurelius had not consulted 
the apostle Paul. Paul would have told him, 
“Love envieth not, and the way to get rid of 
envy is to get a baptism of Christian love.” 

Chalners preached one of his great sermons 
on “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection.” 
That phrase gives us the secret of complete 
victory. Let the heart be opened to the in- 
coming of the baptism of perfect love, and it 
will expel everything which is foreign to it 
and inconsistent with it. Every man who 
loves God with all his heart will love his 
neighbor as himself. He will cherish no 


hatred nor malice, take no pleasure in seeing 
87 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


another humiliated or distressed, but, rather, 
will rejoice in every brother’s success. 

Love envieth not. Envy is devilish; love is 
divine. Love is of God; and every one who 
loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He 
that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is 
love. Love is to be lived, in Corinth and in 
Chicago, in England and in India. There- 
fore we ask Paul to tell us what the further 
characteristics of love may be, that we may 
live them wherever we are. 


88 


CHAPTER III 
LOVE AND EGOTISM 


PAUL Says next, “Love vaunteth not itself, 
is not pulfed up, od meprepeterat, ob pvorovra,”’ 
Sometimes a man does not envy because he is 
so well satisfied with himself and with his own 
possessions. He is so proud of these that it 
never occurs to him that anyone else has any- 
thing of which to be proud or which is to be 
envied. He is free from envy because he is 
full of vaunting. There are mutually exclu- 
sive vices. A miser will not be a spendthrift, 
and it is not at all to his credit that his one 
vice frees him from all temptation to the other. 
So if love envied not simply because love was 
a braggart, not much would be gained; but 
Paul says “Love is free from envying and love 
is just as free from vaunting.” 

Love is not so mean as to envy and love is 
not so foolish as to be puffed up. Love is not 
egotistical. Love never is vain-glorious. Love 
is no proud self-boaster. Love is no swell. 
The characteristics of Christian love as out- 
lined in this chapter seem simple enough in 
themselves, and yet it seems rarely enough 
that any individual realizes them. The char- 


acteristic mentioned now is possibly as rare 
89 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


in ordinary life as any other that the chapter 
contains. Where are the men or the women 
who never have been known to vaunt them- 
selves and never have seemed to be puffed up? 
There are some such people in every com- 
munity, but they are comparatively rare speci- 


mens. ac ; ‘ f re Pe 


I. VAuUNTING ALMOST UNIVERSAL 


Pascal has written, ““Vanity has taken so 
firm a hold on the heart of man that a porter, 
a hodman, a turnspit can talk greatly of him- 
self, and is for having his admirers. Philos- 
ophers who write of the contempt of glory 
do yet desire the glory of writing well; and 
those who read their compositions would not 
lose the glory of having read them. We are 
so presumptuous as that we desire to be 
known to all the world; and even to those who 
are not to come into the world till we have 
left it. And at the same time we are so little 
and vain as that the esteem of five or six per- 
sons about us is enough to content and amuse 
us.”’ 

It is the universal vice. We all are ready 
to excuse our own failings, and to veil our own 
faults under the glamour of some assumed 
virtue. Thus we form a better opinion of our- 


Selves than that for which anybody else can 
90 


LOVE AND EGOTISM 


see any good reason. Our stinginess we call 
economy; our cowardice is prudence; our 
burst of anger is righteous indignation; our 
mean and cutting words are frankness and 
plainness of speech. Our selfishness always 
has solid reasons, and our sins easily can be 
justified in our own eyes. To us our crows 
are all doves; and however black they may 
seem to other eyes and however harsh their 
cawing may sound in other ears, to us they are 
gentle and innocent, cooing and pure, the very 
pride of our household and heart. ‘Could all 
mankind,” said John Norris, “lay claim to that 
estimate which they pass upon themselves, 
there would be little or no difference between 
lapsed and perfect humanity, and God might 
again review his image with paternal com- 
placency, and still pronounce it good.” 

In the book of Proverbs we read, ‘‘The way 
of a fool is right in his own eyes.’* Most peo- 
ple are sure that other people are fools, and 
most fools are sure that they themselves are 
wise. The biggest fool is the man who is sure 
that he alone is wise and all the rest of the 
world is foolish. It would be very difficult 
to find a definition of a fool upon which all 
would agree. Possibly there is no other sub- 
ject upon which there would be such radically 


1 Prov. 12. 15. 01 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


differing opinions. One man’s fool would be 
another man’s ideal. The wise man’s fool 
would be the fool’s wise man. Therefore the 
definition which would suit one man perfectly 
would be at the furthest remove from another 
man’s suitable definition. 

Yet there is one definition to which all men 
immediately would be ready to agree. Every 
man is ready to say: “The fool is the man who 
does not think as I think. The fool is the man 
whose opinion differs with my own.” The 
wise man is ready to believe that, for he sees 
the inherent foolishness of the fool; and the 
fool is ready to believe that, for, as the book 
of Proverbs says, “The way of the fool is right 
in his own eyes.” 

In the home of one of our neighbors a little 
fellow who was just learning to talk came to 
his grandmother and surprised her with the 
solemn and unprovoked statement: “I is a 
good boy, Gamma. I is a very good boy. 
Gamma, you is an old humbug.” Compara- 
tively innocent that was in the little child; 
but unfortunately he expressed the sentiment, 
seldom so bluntly stated, of all mankind. We 
all are apt to be like that unfettered speci- 
men of the younger generation, joining our 
self-congratulation to the condemnation of 


others. 
92 





LOVE AND EGOTISM 


The Republicans are sure that the Demo- 
crats are humbugs who do not have sense 
enough to run the government except in the 
direction of the bowwows. The Democrats 
are sure that the Republicans are humbugs 
who really believe just as they themselves do 
but who talk loudly about the danger of en- 
tangling foreign alliances and the necessity of 
high protective tariffs to save the nation. The 
Communists and the Socialists and the 
Farmer-Labor Party and the Liberals and all 
the minority parties are sure that both the 
Democratic and the Republican parties are 
humbugs, advocating righteousness and re- 
forms only to get votes while they really are 
out for nothing but offices and spoils, while 
they themselves represent the concentrated 
and consummated wisdom and sincerity of 
the nation. Every political party is ready to 
say: “We are the people. Wisdom is with us 
and wisdom will die with us. Therefore, you 
will cast in your lot with us, if you are wise.” 
Even the way of a fool is right in his own eyes. 

The religious man is sure that he has chosen 
the path of wisdom; but the irreligious man 
is prone to call all religious people fanatics, 
cranks, and fools. A commercial traveler who 
was of that opinion was traveling in the same 


car with a clergyman, and by way of a per- 
93 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


sonal thrust he asked the clergyman if he ever 
had heard that in Paris whenever a priest was 
hanged a donkey was hanged at the same time. 
The clergyman smiled at the attempted joke 
and said, “No, I never had heard that,” and 
then added, “Let us both rejoice, my brother, 
that we are not in Paris.” 

Each sect and denomination is apt to think 
that all others are more or less humbugs or 
fools. We cannot conceive how sensible men 
ean go through the mummeries or hold to the 
absurdities which we see in other churches 
and creeds, and what puzzles us in them puz- 
zles them in us; so that we are exactly even 
on that score. We are willing to give them 
credit for honesty of belief and sincerity of 
soul if they are willing to give us credit for 
the same; but when we find a man who be- 
lieves that he has the whole truth of God in 
his private possession and that everybody 
who does not agree with him in every par- 
ticular is unworthy of his fellowship and 
Christian association, we know that he is a 
fool of the first water. 

Yet we have noticed that even if an indi- 
vidual of that stamp may preach the non- 
necessity of physical labor to those who have 
sufficient faith in God to trust him for their 


daily bread, even if he preach that all sick- 
94 


LOVE AND EGOTISM 


ness is sin and all the saints will be perfect 
in health all the time, even if he preach that 
death can be avoided by the faith which 
claims a present immortality, even if he 
preach that the Lord has come for the second 
time and we are now living in the midst of 
the millennium, even if he preach that the 
Second Coming of the Lord and the end of the 
world are due to arrive at a certain date near 
at hand, even if he preach that marriageris not 
a divine institution and that God has nothing 
to do with it, even if he preach that all the 
churches are unclean and therefore we ought 
to have nothing to do with them, even if he 
preach the most extravagant nonsense imagin- 
able, he always can find some fools who will 
follow him. 

While we have respect for the sincerity of 
those in other churches who may differ with 
our church or with us in their opinions in 
certain matters, we have very little respect for 
either the sense or the sincerity of the man 
who professes to be such a saint of God that 
no one of the churches is good enough for 
him. Jesus never became so holy as that. He 
belonged to the visible church, corrupt as it 
was in his day; and he was faithful to all of 
its services and ordinances as long as he lived. 


They had to crucify him to get him out of it. 
95 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


There was no other way to do it. John Wes- 


ley lived and died in the Established Church, | 


corrupt and dead as it was in his day. They 
called him hard names and persecuted him 
and mistreated him in every imaginable way; 
but he was a Churchman to the end. They 
refused him the use of their church pulpits for 
a time, but they could not refuse him admit- 
tance to their communion; and Wesley lived 
in loyal union and communion with the 
church all his days. 

A man once came to Spurgeon and asked 
him if his church was a pure church, and he 
said that he was looking for a pure church 
that he might belong to it. Spurgeon said 
that he did not know about his church. He 
did know that there were many good people 
in it, saintly people and truly Christian peo- 
ple; but there might possibly be a Judas 
among them, as there was in the company of 
the Lord’s first apostles; and there might be 
an Ananias and a Sapphira among them, as 
there were in that first Christian church 
founded at Pentecost; and there might be some 
deceivers and idolaters and those who would 
walk unruly, as there seemed to have been in 
the churches at Rome and Corinth and 
Galatia and Ephesus and Colosse and 


Philippi and Thessalonica and all the others 
96 


—— = — a = 


LOVE AND EGOTISM 


to which Paul and Peter and James and John 
and all the apostles ministered and to which 
the New Testament epistles were written. He 
did not know that his church was any better 
than these New Testament churches had been. 
On the whole he thought that his church was 
not the one this brother was looking for. In- 
deed, he did not know that there had been 
such a church in all history; “but,” said Spur- 
geon, “if you should happen to find such a 
church, I beg of you do not join it, for you 
would spoil the whole thing.” 

If we were in charge of a church and any- 
one desired to leave the church because he 
thought he was not good enough to stay in it, 
we would plead with him to fight on in the 
ranks and we would pray with him that he 
might become good enough to stay with us 
and it would be with the most sincere regret 
that we would permit his name to be dropped 
from the church record on that ground; but if 
we were in charge of a church and anyone de- 
sired to leave the church because he was too 
good for the church and the church was not 
good enough for him, we would not ask any 
questions and we would make no objections. 
We would dismiss him with great fluency and 
facility and felicity, glad to be freed from his 


presence on earth and hopeful that he would 
97 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


be changed in character before we met him 
in heaven. 

No man ever was too good to associate with 
his fellows, in the church or anywhere else. 
It is nothing but vain boasting if he claims 
otherwise. Many of those whom he despises 
are his superiors in many things. They are 
better than he, in some ways if not in all. 
His vaunting is empty. The word carries the 
suggestion of emptiness with it. No man is 
infallible. No man is perfect, in the absolute 
sense. The man who begins to vaunt himself 
proclaims his own emptiness. The man who 
begins to boast proclaims his own poverty. 

That little French lady fell to disputing 
with her sister and she said, “I do not know 
how it happens, sister, but I meet with nobody 
but myself who is always in the right.”’ Most 
of us are tempted to feel that way, even if we 
do not say it. The savage in the simplicity of 
his egotism and the civilized man in the 
sublimity of his self-conceit are very much 
akin. 

We read that a Harvard professor has made 
the calculation that if men really were as big 
as they sometimes feel, there would be room 
in the United States for only two professors, 
three lawyers, two doctors, and one reporter 


on a city paper. The rest of us would be 
98 


LOVE AND EGOTISM 


crowded into the sea and would have to swim. 

How continuously and unconsciously our 
egotism shows itself! A certain preacher de- 
vised a plan to interest his people in the study 
of the Bible. At each midweek meeting he 
would announce the subject for discussion 
one week from that date, so that his people 
would have one week in which to think about 
it and to prepare their remarks upon the topic 
chosen. One evening the subject was “The 
Character of the Apostle Paul.” One of the 
deacons in the beginning of the meeting began 
to describe the apostle’s personal appearance. 
He said Paul was a tall, rather spare man, 
with black hair and eyes and a dark com- 
plexion. His picture of Paul was a faithful 
portrait of himself. Another leading mem- 
ber of the church rose next and said, “I think 
the brother preceding me has read the Scrip- 
ture to little purpose if his description of the 
apostle Paul is a sample of his Bible knowl- 
edge. Paul was, as I understand it, a rather 
short, thick-set man, with sandy hair, gray 
eyes, florid complexion, and a _ nervous, 
sanguine temperament.” As it happened, 
this again was a fairly accurate picture of the 
speaker himself. Then another man took his 
turn. He had a keen sense of the ludicrous 


and he was an inveterate stammerer. He said, 
99 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


“My bre-bre-brethren, I never have fo-found 
in my Bi-Bible much about the p-per-personal 
ap-pe-pear-ance of P-P-Paul; but one thing is 
clearly established and tha-that is, P-P-Paul 
had an imp-p-pediment in his speech.” Un- ‘ 
conscious egotists! Admiring the great 
apostle they each were prone to make him in 
their thought very much like themselves. » <) 


+ i 


We are all prone to be proud of ourselves. 
We are proud of our possibilities. If we only 
had a chance to prove them, then the world 
might see what great men we are. We are 
proud of our achievements and we exaggerate 
them in our boasting, like those old Romans 
~who boasted that all the world was subject to 
Augustus. Eusebius again brags that Con- 
stantine governed all the world. The same 
thing was said of Alexander, that he wept be- 
cause there were no more worlds to conquer. 
Whereas the fact of the case was that neither 
~¢he Greeks nor the Romans ever held the fif- 
teenth part of the now known world, and not 
even half of that which was then described. 
They simply were vaunting themselves, in 
exaggerated self-adulation. We all are proud 
of our wisdom in these days. Says Burton, 


“In former times they had but seven wise men, 
100 





LOVE AND EGOTISM 


now you can scarce find so many fools.” In 
those days the tradition tells us that some 
fishermen found a golden tripos, and the 
oracle commanded that it be sent to the wisest 
man; and Thales sent it to Bias, and Bias to 
Solon, and Solon to Pittacus, and so on till it 
had been sent by each one to each one of the 
Seven Wise Men of Greece. Those wise men 
were really wise and yet so truly humble that 
each thought another more worthy than hin- 
self. “If such a thing were now found, we 
should all fight for it, we are so wise. We 
have women politicians, children metaphysi- 
cians; every fellow can square a circle, make 
perpetual motions, find the philosopher’s 
stone, interpret the Apocalypse, make a new 
system of the world, new logic, new philos- 
ophy, etc. We think so well of ourselves, that 
that in itself is an ample testimony of much 
folly.” 

That beautiful tradition of the Seven Wise 
Men of Greece, each of whom preferred in 
honor another rather than himself, comes from 
the very early history of the nation and may 
be only a tradition after all. The Greeks of 
later and more reliable history were not men 
of that sort. Socrates used to say that if the 
crier should make proclamation in the public 


assembly, “Let all the ¢obblers stand up,” or 
101 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


“Let all the weavers stand up,’ only those so 
named would rise from their seats; but if the 
order should be, “Let all the men of sense 
stand up,’ not one would remain sitting. 
Socrates declared that the most damaging mis- 
take in life was that the majority of men were 
fools and yet believed themselves to be wise. 
Probably that is just as true now as in his 
day. 

Suppose that everybody in our country to- 
morrow noon could be just what he thinks 
he is capable of being, and that when the town 
clock struck twelve every man could step into 
the position which he considers himself 
worthy to occupy. Where would we all land? 
The cadets would all be captains, the clerks 
would all be managers of the concern, the 
preachers would all be bishops, and most of 
the congressmen and senators would be Presi- 
dent. Most of us would move up somewhere. 
if everybody could step into the position he 
thinks himself worthy to occupy, are there 
many of us who would move down? 

Now over against this almost universal 
vanity the apostle writes this sentence: “Love 
vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up.” If that 
is true of love, it ought to be true of us; for 
these characteristics of love are the char- 


acteristics of the Christ, and they ought to be 
102 


LOVE AND EGOTISM 


the characteristics of every professor of Chris- 
tian love, every disciple of the Christ. Puff- 
ing up is not lovely; and it is sinful, and it 
is deceitful, and it is dangerous. 


Ill. Purrine Up 


The Greek verb which Paul uses, gvotovrat, 
means, ‘is puffed up as by the use of a bellows, 
is filled with wind.” These little colored bal- 
loons which are sold on the street corner are 
pretty to look at and sail loftily enough for 
a little while if you let them go; but they are 
very frail indeed and liable to make sudden 
shipwreck. They will collapse at the first 
puncture and all the gas or wind will ooze 
out of them in twenty-four hours at the long- 
est. Those little balloons are suggestive of the 
little bladders of pride with which people are 
wont to buoy themselves up in the winds and 
currents of this world. We recall that speech 
of Wolsey after his fall, 

“T have ventured, like little wanton boys that swim on blad- 
TS 
ae summers in a sea of glory; 
But far beyond my depth: my high-blown pride 
At length broke under me; and now has left me, 


Weary and old with service, to the mercy 
Of a rude stream, that must forever hide me.” 


It is dangerous to trust to these blown-up 


bladders of pride, these little puffed-up bal- 
103 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


loons of self-vaunting which last us so little © 


while and then burst above us or break under 
us and leave us helpless and flat. 

Love is not puffed up, like that frog of 
Asop’s fable. The ox came along and stepped 
on one of the little frogs in her absence and 
when the mother returned they told her how 
a huge beast had crushed one of their brothers 
to death, and the mother frog puffed herself 
out and wanted to know if the beast was as 
big as that in size. One of the little frogs 
said, “Cease, mother, to puff yourself out; for 
you would, I assure you, sooner burst than 
successfully imitate the hugeness of that mon- 
ster.” We think of that fable whenever we 
read Paul’s statement here, and we think of 
the many people we have known who would 
not be content to be one of the biggest frogs 
in their puddle, but who puffed and puffed 
themselves out in the vain -endeavor to rival 
in size every ox in the meadow; people who in 
their desire to push their way into society 
maintained domestic establishments beyond 
their income and beyond their ability and in 
their desire to keep up appearances strained 
and strained and overstrained until at last 
they burst into bankruptcy, and then they 
were only lifeless frogs instead of life-size 
oxen. It is dangerous to be puffed up beyond 

104 


| 


LOVE AND EGOTISM 


measure. Even if the result is not fatal, it is 
likely to make one ridiculous. 

We heard John B. Gough say once in a 
lecture: “A Boston minister told me that when 
he was a young man he preached a sermon in 
a strange church and made a brilliant effort 
and sat down quite well satisfied with him- 
self. An old Scotch minister who was in the 
pulpit made the closing prayer, and he said, 
‘O Lord, bless this young man who has ad- 
dressed us; and, O Lord, prick him hard till 
he has lost all his wind;’ and the Boston min- 
ister told me, ‘It was the best lesson I ever 
had in my life.” It is dangerous to be puffed 
up. Sooner or later one is sure to be puffed 
down. 


TV. Love’s HuMILITY 


In the Corinthian church to which Paul 
writes this epistle there were those who meas- 
ured themselves by themselves alone and who 
fully satisfied their own standard of excel- 
lence. In Pharisaical pride they put them- 
selves on public parade as patterns of pro- 
priety in every respect. There were some 
among them who thought they were much su- 
perior to the apostle Paul. They said of him: 
“In personal appearance he is contemptible 


and base. His bodily presence is insignificant 
105 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


and weak. In speech he stammers. His rhet- 
oric is of the rudest kind. He is a weakling, 
and we have serious doubts as to his sanity 
or his personal responsibility for either his 
actions or his sayings.” Then they said of 
themselves, “We have not come to you unau- 
thorized and irresponsible, as he did. We 
have these letters of recommendation from the 
brethren at Jerusalem.” 

Paul heard of these things there in Mace- 
donia and he wrote to the Corinthians in the 
second epistle, “Not he who commendeth him- 
self is approved, but whom the Lord com- 
mendeth.”? Whom did the Lord commend? 
These slanderers and vain boasters are un- 
heard of in the after history. Paul went on 
about his business and God commended him 
everywhere and wrote his biography in the 
race in letters large and plain for evermore. 
He was God’s chosen vessel to bear his name 
unto Gentiles and Jews and before the kings 
of the earth. Yet what did he continually say 
of himself? “I am the least of the apostles 
who am not meet to be called an apostle.”* 
“Unto me who am less than the least of all 
the saints is grace given.’* “Christ Jesus 





21 Cor. 15. 9. 
32 Cor. 10. 18. 
‘Eph. 3. 8. 
106 





LOVE AND EGOTISM 


came into the world to save sinners of whom 
I am chief.”° 

“God resisteth the proud, but he giveth 
grace to the humble.’® He condemneth the 
vain boaster. He commendeth the humble in 
heart. Milton says that it was pride that 
made the angels fall, and all the world knows 
that it is human pride which most often stands 
between a soul and the commendation of God. 
Egypt was proud, and Ezekiel prophesied, 
“Thus saith the Lord, They also who uphold 
Egypt shall fall, and the pride of her power 
shall come down.’* Moab was proud, but 
Isaiah prophesied, “God shall bring down 
your pride.’®> Babylon was proud, but Jere- 
miah prophesied, “Behold, I am against thee, 
O thou most proud, saith the Lord God of 
hosts; for the day is come, the time that I will 
visit thee; and the most proud shall stumble 
and fall, and none shall raise him up.” 

The children of Ammon were proud, but 
Zephaniah prophesied, ‘‘As I live, saith the 
Lord of hosts, the children of Ammon shall be 
as Gomorrah, even the breeding of nettles and 
saltpits and a perpetual desolation. This 
81 Tim. 1. 15. 

6 Jas. 4. 6. 

7 Ezek. 30. 6. 

® Isa. 25. 11. 


® Jer. 50. 31. 
107 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


shall they have for their pride, because they 
have magnified themselves against the people 
of the lord of Hosts.’*® The overthrow of these 
nations and the humiliation of their pride 
simply illustrates the truth stated again 
and again in the Word. A man’s pride shall 
bring him low. Pride goeth before destruc- 
tion. Pride shall stumble and fall. Pride 
cometh, and then cometh shame. Woe to the 
crown of pride! The Lord will destroy the 
house of the proud. Every one who is proud 
in heart is an abomination to the Lord. The 
Lord hateth a proud look. <A proud heart is 
Sin. God resisteth the proud and he giveth 
grace to the humble. ) 
Nebuchadnezzar the king looked out of the 
window upon the city of gold, as Isaiah called 
it in his prophecy; and its forty-five miles of 
compass within its great walls were filled with 
high houses and lofty towers and imposing 
edifices and magnificent government build- 
ings, and they were filled with many people 
and much wealth. Nebuchadnezzar looked 
over it all and said within himself, “Is not this 
great Babylon which I have built for the house 
of the kingdom, and by the might of my 
power, and for the honor of my majesty?”! 
10 Zeph. 2. 10. 


U Dan. 4. 30. 
108 





LOVE AND EGOTISM 


And while the word was yet within his mouth 
there fell a yoice from heaven, “Thy kingdom 
is departed from thee!’ Like a lightning 
stroke from a clear sky he suddenly was bereft 
of his reason and memory, and in abject in- 
sanity he went wandering out into the wilder- 
ness, where for seven years he lived the life 
of a brute. Over against the proud boaster 
God’s condemnation was written and him who 
walked in pride he was able to abase. 

Over in the Temple court two men were 
praying. One stood and said: “O God, I am 
very good. Other men are extortioners, un- 
just, and adulterers; but I thank thee, O God, 
that I am not like other men.” The other man 
in his praying had nothing to say about any- 
one else and had nothing good to say about 
himself; but bowing his head and smiting his 
breast he cried, ‘““O God, be merciful to me a 
sinner!” “I tell you,” said Jesus, “this man 
went down to his house justified rather than 
the other; for everyone who exalteth himself 
shall be abased and everyone who humbleth 
himself shall be exalted.”’* It is wise to be 
humble, and wisdom always is characterized 
by humility. 

Self-conceit is born of ignorance, and a suffi- 
ciency of self-conceit will breed continuous 


#2 Luke 18. 14. 
109 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


ignorance. Socrates was the wisest man 
among the Greeks, and he knew that he did 
not know anything. That was his wisdom. 
That was his superiority to the little men all 
about him who prided themselves on their 
knowledge of things they did not know. The 
Platonic Dialogues are samples of the Socratic 
questioning which pricked the bubbles of self- 
conceit and showed the hollowness of their 
pretension and the emptiness of their vain 
show. Real scholarship always is humble. 
The degree of a man’s scholarship usually is 
apparent in the degree of his humility. 

If a man knows too much for you to tell 
him anything, you may be sure that he will 
live and die a hopeless fool. Superiority to 
all information from any quarter is a sure 
sign of exceptional shallowness of attainment. 
The great scholars always are willing to 
learn; like Agassiz, the child who “wandered 
away and away with Nature, the dear old 
nurse, who sang to him night and day the 
rimes of the universe.” She kept him “still 
a child, and would not let him go,” and this 
childlike, teachable, humble spirit helped 
Agassiz his long life through to “read what 
was still unread in the manuscripts of God,” 
and made him the greatest naturalist in his 


generation. 
110 


LOVE AND EGOTISM 


The Duke of Argyll knew Tennyson well, 
and he said of his life-long friend: “He was 
a man of the noblest humility I have ever 
known. It was not that he was unconscious of 
his own powers. It was not that he was in- 
different to the appreciation of them by 
others. But it was that he was far more con- 
tinually conscious of the limitations upon 
them in the face of those problems of the uni- 
verse with which, in thought, he was habit- 
ually dealing. In his inner spirit he seemed 
to me to be always feeling his own later 


words: 
‘But what am I? 


An infant crying in the night; 
An infant crying for the light; 
And with no language but a cry.’”’ 

Michael Angelo was an old man. One day 
Cardinal Farnese found him walking alone in 
the ruins of the Coliseum, and when he asked 
Michael Angelo what he was doing there, the 
old man said, “I go yet to school that I may 
continue to learn.” The great souls always 
are humble. They know enough to know they 
ought to be. That is the difference between 
them and more shallow men. Jerome tells 
us that Theophrastus was one hundred and 
seven years old when he lamented that he must 
quit life just when he was beginning to be 


wise, 
111 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


The older men grow and the more they 
know the less they feel like boasting of their 
limited attainment; it is only a beginning to 
be wise. Mozart was lying upon his deathbed 
when he said, “Now I begin to see what might. 
be done in music.” He had written some of 
the most wonderful sonatas and symphonies 
we have, and yet at the end of a life of remark- 
able achievement he felt that he was only a 
beginner in the art. The French artist Corot 
once said, “When I find myself in one of 
nature’s beautiful places, I grow angry with 
my pictures.” The best he could do was so 
far below nature’s commonplaces that he was 
mortified with his own incompetence. We all 
remember what Sir Isaac Newton said, “I do 
not know what I may appear to the world; 
but to myself I seem to have been only like a 
boy playing on the seashore and diverting my- 
self in now and then finding a smoother pebble 
or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the 
great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered be- 
fore me.” 

It is the man who knows little who is apt 
to think he knows all. The man who knows 
most knows how much there is to be known. 
Why did Fenton John Anthony Hort write 
so little? Armitage Robinson said of him: 


“We felt as if he really knew everything. Of 
112 


LOVE AND EGOTISM 


the obscurest book we said, ‘Dr. Hort is sure 
to have it; of the most perplexing problem, 
‘Dr. Hort knows the solution, if he would only 
tell; of any subject, ‘Dr. Hort will tell you 
all the literature. And, indeed, nothing 
seemed to have escaped him that had been 
done in any branch of theological research.” 
Yet Dr. Hort published very little. 

A reviewer has said, “Other men rushed 
past him into print, and their words were ac- 
cepted as the highest water-mark of scholar- 
ship. Hort knew that it was not the highest, 
had something higher himself indeed, and 
would not publish.” Why not? He knew too 
much to be satisfied with the results which 
satisfied lesser men. He knew so much more 
than they about what was yet to be known 
that he kept pressing on toward the goal to 
the day of his death. He had the ever-in- 
creasing humility of great and greater scholar- 
ship. 

Every great scholar is like that greatest 
artist of Italy who in his last days drew a de- 
sign of himself as a child in a go-cart, and 
wrote under it, “I am yet learning.” If we 
are not willing to learn, there is no hope for 
us. Seest thou a man who is wise in his own 
conceits? There is more hope of a fool than 


there is of him. Seest thou a man who is will- 
113 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


ing to get good from any source and at any 
sacrifice of personal pride and dignity? There 
is some hope that a man like that will get his 
head and his heart filled with divine grace and 
truth. 

Here is John Wesley, Fellow of Lincoln, a 
university man; a clergyman of the Church of 
England. What is he doing in this little room 
with this little company of poor and obscure 
Moravians? John Wesley knows more many 
times over than anyone else in the room, more 
about the Greek of the Epistle to the Ro- 
mans; but they are talking about the spiritual 
experience pictured and promised in it now, 
and John Wesley sits and listens and learns 
and his heart gets strangely warmed and 
finally filled with life and power sufficient 
under God to regenerate the nation. John 
Wesley knew that the mysteries of the King- 
dom often were hidden from the wise and the 
prudent while God chose to reveal them unto 
babes. 

It is not easy to be humble. Coventry Pat- 


more calls it 


“the highest degree 
Of the hardest grace—Humility, 
The step toward heaven the latest trod, 
And that which makes us most like God.” 


Yet Paul seems to think it possible of attain- 


ment even in Corinth; and forty years later 
114 


LOVE AND EGOTISM 


Clement of Rome wrote to these Corinthians, 
“Ye were all humble-minded, not boasting 
about anything, willing rather to be subject 
than to govern.” The apostle Paul had told 
them, “Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed 
up.” The characterizing quality of Christian 
love is not egotism but humility. 

When his people asked Augustine, “What is 
the first article in the Christian religion?” 
Augustine answered, “Humility.” They said, 
“What is the second?” and he said, “Hu- 
mility.” They said, “What is the third?” and 
he said the third time, “Humility.” Pride is 
as natural to men as their breathing. It is 
the easily besetting sin of the race; but our 
Christian religion believes in a radical change 
in a man’s nature, a change so radical that 
pride and self-love will be dethroned in his 
heart and humility will become his character- 
istic instead. Christian love will prove itself 
in continuous humility; and, thanks be unto 
the God of all grace, Christianity always has 
had living examples. 

Humility need not be inconsistent with the 
highest honors which the church or the state 
can bestow upon a man. Adam Clarke had 
entered into the experience of perfect love; 
and he showed always the humble spirit of his 


Master, even when he was recognized as one 
115 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


of the greatest scholars in England and the 
leading commentator of his church and had 
been advanced to the highest eminence which 
his own denomination could give him. He 
writes: “I am returned to London, and am 
now at the highest pitch of honor Methodism 
can confer upon me as president of the Con- 
ference and superintendent of the London Dis- 
trict at the same time. . . . The Lord 
knows I never sought it. Well, I would rather 
have one smile from my Maker than all the 
world could confer besides.” That was the 
humble spirit of Adam Clarke, the first great 
commentator, in his day. 

We can parallel that experience with an- 
other nearer our own generation. A Meth- 
odist evangelist had been holding meetings in 
Australia, and thousands had been converted. 
He was about to leave for America; and at the 
farewell service the night before his embarka- 
tion York Street Church in Sydney was filled 
to overflowing and a great hall in the neigh- 
borhood was filled with the overflow meeting. 
Early the next morning a great assembly 
thronged the wharves, and a steamer, spe- 
cially chartered for the occasion, escorted the 
steamer on which the evangelist was a pas- 
senger down through the harbor to the heads; 


and the people who packed it were singing 
116 


LOVE AND EGOTISM 


and shouting farewell. The crown prosecutor 
of New South Wales, a nephew of the Duke 
of Wellington, was one of the leaders in that 
demonstration; and he so strained his voice 
in singing and shouting that day that he was 
hoarse for a week. At last the outgoing 
steamer passed the heads, the last farewells 
were shouted, and the people turned back 
again. | 

The evangelist says, “I have always tried 
to avoid the appearance of being lionized, 
wishing to hide away at the feet of my Lord; 
but I fully appreciated the grateful, loving 
sympathy of the precious souls with whom I 
had wept and prayed and praised God, and I 
fully reciprocated their farewell expressions 
of confidence and love; and as soon as we had 
passed the heads I went into my cabin and 
fell down before the Lord and wept and 
ascribed all the honor to God and prayed that 
these dear ones whom I had left behind might 
be true to the end.” There is the experience 
of Christian love, not vaunting itself nor be- 
ing puffed up, but humbly ascribing all honor 
to God and humbly acknowledging full de- 
pendence upon him. Who was that Methodist 
evangelist? He was William Taylor, of Cali- 
fornia, afterward Bishop Taylor of Africa. 


There was not a plainer or more unassum- 
117 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


ing man in all Christendom than he. A man 
of magnificent achievement, ranking with 
General Booth in his generation as the organ- 
izer of great onward movements of the Chris- 
tian host; and yet as simple in his manner 
as a country farmer, as a little child. Gentle- 
spirited, unselfish, and humble, he was a good 
example of that love which suffers long and 
is kind, which envies not, which vaunts not 
itself and is not puffed up. Any one who 
knew Bishop Taylor knew what a plain, prac- 
tical, matter-of-fact man he was, prone to look 
on all his wonderful work, unparalleled in 
some respects in the modern church, as a 
matter of course, possible to any faithful and 
humble instrument in God’s hands. Our mod- 
ern Pauline missionary had the Pauline hu- 
mility: 

That sturdy plainness in his manner and 
speech, that seemingly so natural and so con- 
tinuous humility of soul, was the most attrac- 
tive trait in his character. If Bishop Taylor 
had spoken with the tongue of an angel, if he 
had had the gift of prophecy, and had under- 
stood all mysteries and all knowledge, if he 
had bestowed all his goods to feed the poor 
and had given his body to be burned, we verily 
believe that neither here nor in heaven would 


he ever have vaunted himself about it or have 
118 


LOVE AND EGOTISM 


been puffed up. We believe that he had the 
experience of perfect love. 

That is a possibility of grace to any man; 
and that is a miracle of divine power wrought 
in any man. Glorious things have been 
spoken of the people of God in all history. 
Marvelous narratives are recorded there on 
the pages of Scripture, and equally marvelous 
narratives are to be found in the later history 
of the church; great wonders of faith and 
wonders of love, wonders of self-denial and 
self-sacrifice, wonderful victories in the cru- 
sades against sin and heroic achievements in 
the strife with the lions of the pit, going up 
and down through the earth seeking whom 
they may devour. 

Yet of all the wonders and heroic achieve- 
ments and glorious characteristics of the peo- 
ple of God there is none greater than their 
humility. There in the depths of their own 
hearts the greatest battles have been fought; 
and there the supreme triumph has been 
won. By grace divine they have conquered 
self; and so have become worthy disciples of 
that Saviour who when he would commend 
himself to the suffering and the heavy-laden 
of earth said to them, “Take my yoke upon 
you; for I am meek and lowly of heart.” 


Meek and lowly, though divine! 
119 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


It is natural to be puffed up. It is natural 
to vaunt oneself. It is natural to be proud 
and egotistical; but the Christian prays for 
supernatural grace. 


“Thy nature, gracious Lord, impart; 
Come quickly from above; 
Write thy new name upon my heart, 
Thy new, best name of Love.” 


Love enthroned means spiritual humility. 
Spiritual humility is best proof of sainthood. 
We are called to be saints, Paul says. He 
who calls us is able to give us all that we need 
according to his riches in glory by Christ. 


120 


CHAPTER IV 


LOVE AND ETIQUETTE 


THE incarnation of the Christian ideal 
never will be guilty of unseemly behavior. We 
cannot imagine anything of the kind in Jesus. 
Probably with Jesus in mind, Paul says, 
“Love doth not behave itself unseemly.” 


I. Love Is ALWAYS GENTEEL 


It is a rather surprising characteristic of 
love to which Paul introduces us here. He 
tells us that Love is well behaved. The spirit 
of perfect love is the spirit of a perfect gentle- 
man. Politeness has been defined as external 
Shristianity; and Christian love here is de- 
fined as internal and external etiquette. 
Politeness has been defined also as “love in 
trifles,” love ruling in all the little details of 
life. A Christian may be awkward and 
blundering sometimes, but his love will make 
even his awkwardness attractive and his be- 
havior never will be unseemly or impolite. 

Love will be courteous even to its enemies. 
Love will be brotherly even on a battlefield. 


Love never will be a boor nor a _ brute. 
121 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


Thackeray said of Dean Swift and Goldsmith: 
“T think I would rather have had a potato 
and a friendly word from Goldsmith than 
have been beholden to the Dean for a guinea 
and a dinner. He insulted a man as he 
served him, made women cry, guests look fool- 
ish, bullied unlucky friends, and flung his 
benefactions in poor men’s faces.” 

“Manners maketh the man,” as the motto 
of an ancient school said; but it has been sug- 
gested that it would be truer to say that the 
man makes his manners. The Knights of the 
Cross will be patterns of chivalry. They will 
not be selfish and tactless and rude. They 
will not substitute brusqueness for brotherli- 
ness. They will not needlessly bruise a 
brother’s soul. With Saint Francis de Sales 
they will say, “Judicious silence is far prefer- 
able to the truth roughly told.” They will 
be candid, but they will be courteous. They 
will be honest, but they will at the same time 
be helpful. Their sympathy will make them 
seemly. 

The Christian man or woman, possessed by 
the spirit of Christian love, always will be 
refined and delicate in feeling, sensible in 
action, full of grace and full of tact. There 
is no such grace in behavior and spirit and 


speech as that which is given by the spirit of 
122 


LOVE AND ETIQUETTE 


love. There is no such tact and refinement 
of feeling possible to the most polished 
courtier who simply has been trained in the 
schools as is possible to the most untutored 
soul who has begun to love. Love gives in- 
sight. It is selfishness which is blind to 
others’ feelings and desires. Love is unmind- 
ful of self, but ever watchful to see what the 
loved one may need, and ever quick with its 
offer of sympathy and service. 

Love gives identity of spirit. Love ean put 
itself into another’s place and can love its 
neighbor as itself. Then it never will behave 
itself unseemly to its neighbor. It will be im- 
possible for love to do that. It will be like 
Mary’s precious ointment; its fragrance will 
fill the whole house. Like that delicate per- 
fume, it will pervade all of life’s actions and 
make them pleasant and sweet. We are told 
that there will be no need of the sun in the 
New Jerusalem because God is the light of it, 
the God who is Infinite Love. So love here 
will be like the sunlight, blessing all upon 
whom it may fall and making all faces to shine 
in its reflected splendor. It will shed its 
beams upon the just and the unjust and will 
cheer all alike. 

Some army officers asked a lady to tell them 


what a gentleman was, and she answered them 
123 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


by repeating the fifteenth psalm. “Lord, who 
shall abide in thy tabernacle? Who shall 
dwell in thy holy hill? He that walketh up- 
rightly, and worketh righteousness, and 
speaketh the truth in his heart. He that back- 
biteth not with his tongue, nor doeth evil to 
his neighbor, nor taketh up a reproach against 
his neighbor. In whose eyes a vile person is 
condemned; but he honoreth them that fear 
the Lord. He that sweareth to his own hurt, 
and changeth not. He that putteth not out 
his money to usury, nor taketh reward against 
the innocent. He that doeth these things shall 
never be moved.” He that doeth these things 
is a perfect gentleman, the type of honor and 
good breeding, refinement and courtesy; and 
the man that doeth these things must be a 
Christian. The Christian man then is the best 
type of a gentleman; and that is what Paul 
is saying in this chapter. 

Christian love is the shortest and surest 
way into good manners. If anyone is desir- 
ous of acquiring the external proofs of good 
breeding and real gentility, the apostle Paul 
would advise him not to go to a dancing school 
or a finishing school, but to get the baptism of 
perfect love. A lady never behaves herself un- 
seemly. A gentleman never behaves himself 


unseemly. A woman, then, filled with Chris- 
124 


LOVE AND ETIQUETTE 


tian love will be a lady, a man filled with Chris- 
tian love will be a gentleman, as surely as the 
apostle Paul is correct in his characterization. 
Paul says that love always will be courteous 
and well behaved. Paul says that the Chris- 
tian man always will be a gentleman. 

There are people who would not accept that 
statement of fact. To them a gentleman is a 
man who comes of a good family, or a man of 
means who dresses in the latest fashion and 
observes all the social proprieties. A gentle- 
man is a man with kid gloves and blue blood 
and an establishment. A French writer tells 
us of that old lady who said: “I have been 
reading with great satisfaction the genealogies 
which prove that Jesus Christ descended from 
David. It shows that our Lord was a gentle- 
man.” She would have been satisfied if the 
Gospels had given no further proof that Jesus 
was a gentleman than those first chapters of 
genealogies which showed that he was de- 
scended from a king. Paul would not have 
been satisfied with a gospel of genealogies. 
He would have looked into the record of the 
life to see if it was the continuous manifesta- 
tion of love. Was it true of him that he suf- 
fered long, and was kind, vaunted not himself, 
sought not his own, rejoiced not in iniquity 


but rejoiced in the truth? Then Paul would 
125 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


have been willing to say of him, “He did not 
behave himself unseemly; he was the incarna- 
tion of love.” 

Thackeray tells us about a dying duchess 
who looked forward to her coming dissolution 
and her subsequent fate with great calmness 
because she said she was sure that Heaven 
would deal politely with a person of her 
quality; but the probability is that some of 
the quality people will be surprised by 
rougher handling after death than they ever 
have known before. The probability is that 
no one will be asked, “Are you a duchess?” 
but the only question will be, “Did you ex- 
emplify in your life the characteristics of 
Christian love which Paul has outlined in his 
epistle?” Heaven will deal politely only with 
those ladies and gentlemen who have meas- 
ured up to that standard; and the probability 
is that there will be many more of such coming 
up before the great white throne out of fisher- 
men’s huts and carpenters’ shops and the cot- 
tages of the poor than from the palaces of the 
nobles and the courts of the kings. They will 
belong to love’s gentility, though they never 
wore kid gloves nor boasted of their ancestry ; 
and it may be, though they never knew nor 
practiced a tithe of the rules and regulations | 


of so-called Society. 
126 


LOVE AND ETIQUETTE 


II. Love May Break Somp RULES 


Love never will behave itself unseemly; but 
Love may not observe all of the social pro- 
prieties. Many of these are ridiculous and un- 
reasonable; and Love will break them with a 
clear conscience and a smiling face and a com- 
placent sense of unquestioned superiority. 
History tells us of that Spanish king whose 
chair was placed too near the fire; and when 
the flames leaped higher and higher and he 
became uncomfortably warm, as luck would 
have it the court official was not present whose 
duty it was to move the king’s chair. It would 
have been entirely beneath the royal dignity 
for the king to move the chair himself; and 
no one else present dared to brave a breach of 
court etiquette to do it. So the poor king sat 
there and roasted; and when at last the court 
official came whose duty and privilege it was 
to move the chair, it was found that the king 
was much overheated, and history tells us that 
he took suddenly sick thereafter and died. 
Love would have moved the chair and let pro- 
prieties take care of themselves. 

There is no more painfully ludicrous chap- 
ter in world history than that which records 
the flight of the king and queen of France from 


Paris in the days of the French Revolution. 
127 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


They had decided that their lives were not safe 
in the city, and that it was high time that they 
escaped to their friends at Metz. Their flight 
must be secret and in disguise; but yet the 
royal pair felt that there must be much and 
worthy preparation. First, the queen must 
have a lot of new dresses; for no queen could 
stir without new clothes. It took time to make 
them, and they were likely to rouse much 
suspicion, and so hinder their flight and en- 
danger their lives; but the queen had to have 
her new dresses. ‘Moreover,’ says Carlyle, 
“her Majesty cannot go a step anywhither 
without her Necessaire; dear Necessaire, of 
inlaid ivory and rosewood; cunningly devised ; 
which holds perfumes, toilette implements, in- 
finite small queenlike furnitures: necessary 
to terrestrial life. Not without a cost of some 
five hundred louis, of much precious time, and 
difficult hoodwinking which does not blind, 
can this same Necessary of life be forwarded 
by the Flanders carriers. AJ] of which, you 
would say, augurs ill for the prospering of 
the enterprise. But the whims of women and 
of queens must be humored.” 

Then the king had a stupendous and con- 
Spicuous new coach constructed by some of 
his friends to carry their party in one com- 


pany. It was heavy and lumbersome, but it 
128 


LOVE AND ETIQUETTE 


was built according to model and was very 
grand in its way. Then that night of the 
twentieth of June all the world knows how 
they all slipped out of the palace, and how 
the queen lost her way and there was a delay 
of two hours or so before they got started; 
and Lafayette had gotten rumor of the flight 
and was there to see about it, and there was 
no moment to lose. Then the governess of the 
royal children remembered that it was con- 
trary to court etiquette for her to ride in the 
Same carriage with their Majesties, or some- 
thing of that sort, and she refused to get in, 
and they had to argue the question with her 
a long time before she was willing to go in 
that fashion; and when at last they rolled out 
of Paris it was only to be captured in good 
Season and brought back to execution. 

King Louis on his way to the guillotine did 
not ride in a stupendous and conspicuous new 
carriage made expressly for royalty; and 
Marie Antoinette on her way to the block had 
no further use for new dresses or toilet cases 
of inlaid ivory and rosewood. It is one of the 
most tragically ridiculous chapters of history, 
that sacrifice of a king and queen of France, 
who possibly might have made their escape 
into freedom and further life, hindered, de- 


layed, defeated, and captured by their punc- 
129 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


tilious observance of petty details of court 
etiquette. 

Christian love can be entirely consistent 
with an absolute disregard of some of the 
arbitrary requirements which fashion or the 
Four Hundred or the customs of the times 
may see fit to Set up. A lady told us some 
time since that her grandmother had been a 
lifelong Methodist; but she chanced to go 
visiting into a neighboring State, and when 
she came home again she had a flower in her 
bonnet; and the good church people made so 
much trouble about that flower in her bonnet 
that she finally left their communion and 
went into the Baptist church. It must have 
been the custom among the Methodists in that 
community at that time to wear a costume 
characterized by primitive plainness; and 
nothing but a Quaker simplicity of dress was 
countenanced in the public congregation. It 
would be a strange thing indeed if in these days 
a woman would be driven out of the church 
simply because she wore a flower in her bon- 
net. We have learned that real religion may 
be consistent with attractiveness of dress and 
appearance; and we have come to believe that 
Christian love may be cherished in the heart 
of a woman, even though she had a flower in 


her bonnet. 
130 


LOVE AND ETIQUETTE 


John Inskip was a Methodist apostle of per- 
fect love for many years. In his early life, 
when he was a member of a Conference in 
Ohio, he had serious difficulty in his congrega- 
tion and there was danger of his losing his 
ministerial standing in the Conference. What 
was wrong with John Inskip? What was his 
crime? He was a godly man and he had not 
broken any of the Ten Commandments. He 
was a loyal Methodist and had never preached 
heretical doctrines; but he had come to the 
conclusion that it was perfectly proper and 
right for men and women to sit side by side 
in the Sunday congregation. This was an 
innovation against which the conservatives 
rebelled. There were gray-haired grand- 
fathers there who never had sat on the same 
side of the church with the gray-haired grand- 
mothers, their wives, and it seemed to them 
that it would be impossible for even the most 
reverent among them suitably to collect his 
thoughts for the solemn meditation which be- 
fitted the Sabbath, if he should sit surrounded 
by the women; and it was self-evident that 
the younger members of the congregation 
would be tempted beyond measure to think 
more of their adjacent and attractive com- 
panions than they would of their souls or 


of the sermon. 
131 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


God had blessed the church in the good old 
way, when the men and the women sat 
decently separate from each other; and now 
if the bars were let down, and the young peo- 
ple and the middle-aged and the old sat pro- 
miscuously together, it simply would be turn- 
ing the preaching into a party, and inviting 
the devil to run the concern. All past experi- 
ence was on the side of the conservatives; but 
John Inskip had made up his mind that if any 
husband desired to sit with his wife in the 
Sunday congregation, he not only would not 
object but he would countenance the proce- 
dure as proper and right. There was a great 
uproar about it. They said it was unseemly; 
but John Inskip, even with the experience of 
perfect love, never could see it that way, any 
more than we do to-day. 

It is as true in this generation as in any 
which has preceded it that the customs of the 
times may be arbitrary and unreasonable, 
frivolous and ridiculous; and love will not 
behave itself unseemly when it calmly and 
conscientiously and deliberately disregards 
them. One of the advantages of the twentieth 
century will be the comparative emancipation 
of our young men and our young women and 
our race from the tyrannical tutelage of 


Mother Grundy, and this will be measurably 
132 


LOVE AND ETIQUETTE 


replaced by the larger liberty of the children 
of God. 

It will take some courage to decide for our. 
selves in these matters. It is so easy to say 
that whatever general opinion approves as 
seemly therefore is right. No one ever will 
get into trouble by saying that, and timorous 
souls always will be ready to take refuge be- 
hind the bulwark of public opinion and estab- 
lished custom in their standards of conduct 
and life. On the contrary, love will say that 
only that which is right is seemly, and it will 
take some courage to stand by the right even 
though one must stand alone. Love can de- 
cide for itself what is etiquette; and we would 
rather have the decision of love on any matter 
of good behavior or real refinement or Chris- 
tian courtesy than the dictum of any book of 
etiquette yet published. Love will not behave 
itself unseemly. Love can be trusted in that 
regard. 


IIf. Lovns, ALwAys SEEMLY 


Is it seemly for women to be out on the 
battlefield, or is that not Amazonian and un- 
feminine? Generally speaking, it is better for 
women to be away from these scenes of vio- 
lence and bloodshed; but here is a woman with 


a Red Cross on her raiment, an angel of mercy 
133 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


and a messenger of peace. She passes from 
dying soldier to dying soldier and many a wan 
face lights up with a smile as she goes by. 
She gives a drink of water to one, medicine 
to another, and an encouraging word to a 
third. She stoops and makes a pillow of 
clothes to put under the head of this sufferer, 
reads a passage from the Word of God to that 
other pleading soul, prays with him a moment 
or two till his eyes are filled with tears of 
rejoicing and his heart is filled with peace, re- 
ceives his last message to the loved ones at 
home, and then closes the eyelids, dimmed in 
death. It is the spirit of self-sacrificing love 
which has sent this Sister of the Red Cross 
out upon the battlefield; and no one would 
think of calling her unwomanly. Love doth 
not behave itself unseemly, even in the time of 
war and on the battlefield. 

Here are the purlieus of a great city. Vice 
holds high carnival here every night. All the 
grossest passions of the lowest orders of so- 
ciety are displayed on these streets. Gam- 
bling, drunkenness, profanity, obscenity here 
have their home. There are plenty of painted, 
loud-voiced, loud-mannered women in these — 
cabarets and parading up and down these 
streets; and no woman of a respectable char- 


acter, no lady with a reputation to lose, ever 
134 


LOVE AND ETIQUETTE 


would be seen in this vicinity after night. 
Wait a moment! Here comes a female figure 
clad all in black, except the white bow to her 
bonnet and the white cuffs at her wrists. She 
moves straight through the throng, for she is 
on the King’s business which requires haste. 
Her step is light, her manner quiet and self- 
possessed, her face has the beauty of holiness 
and the radiance of peace. 

She may be insulted by some brazen-faced 
hussy, but she either does not hear or she does 
not heed. She smiles on the little ones, run- 
ning wild here at this late hour of the night, 
and has a kind word for any slum acquaint- 
ance she may meet. For the most part the 
men and women make way for her with a 
courtesy unusual with them, and a spirit of 
silence seems to fall upon them for a moment 
or two when she has passed. She is a Deacon- 
ess, and she has been summoned to the bed- 
side of some sufferer there in a slum garret, 
anxious to have one more look at a face which 
has seemed through all these days of sickness 
like a revelation of the glory and peace of 
heaven. Is there anything unseemly in her 
presence there? No, not unseemly, but unsel- 
fish ; not imprudent, but Christlike in self-for- 
getting love. 


135 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


IV. Love Is LIKE CHRIST 


There were prudes among the Pharisees of 
our Lord’s day who were greatly shocked by 
the behavior of Jesus when he consorted 
openly with publicans and sinners; but Jesus 
said, “The whole have no need of a physician, 
but the sick,” and the summons from a sick 
body or a sick soul would call him out at any 
hour of the night and into any slum of the 
city. ‘The Lord’s love of souls never led him 
to behave himself unseemly, however much 
he may have been criticized by the Mother 
and Father Grundys of that day. 

He was tried under all conditions and cir- 
cumstances, he was tested in all classes of so- 
ciety; but everywhere he went he was the in- 
carnation of love and courtesy. In the great 
city of Jerusalem, and in the carpenter’s shop 
at Nazareth, on the borders of the heathen 
Phoeenicia and in the wilderness of Juda, on 
the shores of Gennesaret and on the banks 
of the Jordan, with the learned rabbi of the 
Sanhedrin and with the fallen woman at the 
well, there at the wedding feast of Cana and 
there with the funeral procession at Nain, 
with the children and with his disciples, with 
the lepers and the cripples, with the elders 


and the scribes, with the enthusiastic populace 
136 


LOVE AND ETIQUETTE 


of Galilee and with the hostile throngs at the 
great feast, with Pilate and the Roman sol- 
diers, with Mary and John, he was tried under 
all circumstances and with all classes, but 
he never behaved himself unseemly, he always 
was the same Saviour of courtesy and love. 
His courtesy was unfailing, because his love 
was inexhaustible. 

Love filled his heart and guided his thought 
and chose his words. Love moved his hands 
and beamed from his eye and ruled all his be- 
havior. He always did the right thing in the 
right place, because love gives wisdom; and 
he was the incarnation of love. Look at our 
Lord! His heart always is full of sympathy 
and his manner always is full of grace. Who- 
ever comes to him finds him always the same. 
They may come as suppliants and disciples 
or they may come as blasphemers and revilers, 
he always is kindly, he never is bitter. The 
sun may shine over him or the storm may 
rage about, he is steadfast, simple, gentle, 
pure; and in the most severe testing he never 
behaved himself unseemly; he was ever the 
same loving Lord. 

Would you like to know how always to do 
only what is proper and right? Sit at the 
feet of this Lord. Look unto him, listen to 


him, learn from him, follow after him, pray 
137 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


unceasingly to him, “Give me of the spirit of 
thy love, that I may not behave myself un- 
seemly in the sight of God and that I always 
may be courteous and loving to my fellow- 
men.” He is the pattern. He is the ideal. 
The Christian is to be as his Lord. Jesus was 
long-suffering, kind, unenvying, unegotistical, 
well-behaved. The Christian may be so too. 


138 


CHAPTER V 


LOVE AND ITS RIGHTS 


WE come now to the most difficult state- 
ment which we have found thus far in this 
chapter. The other characteristics of love 
which have been mentioned immediately com- 
mend themselves to every man’s conscience 
and judgment. As a rule, the most irritable 
and irascible man will some time or other wish 
more or less earnestly that he had a more even 
temper; and he will admire the more equable 
disposition of his long-suffering neighbor. As 
a rule, the most envious and egotistical man 
perforce will feel within him an admiration 
for any exhibition of genuinely unselfish gen- 
erosity and humility. All sorts and condi- 
tions of men will be ready to express real ap- 
preciation of the ideally beautiful character 
which the apostle has pictured in that love 
which suffers long and is kind, which envies 
not, which vaunteth not itself, and is not 
puffed up; but now the apostle adds a char- 
acteristic to which the average man will not 
yield so ready appreciation or assent. Paul 


says, “Love seeketh not her own.” 
139 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


I. RicHTrs MAINTAINED 


The average man is ready to say: “My own 
belongs to me. It is my right; and it is right 
for me to have my right. I do not ask for 
anything that is not rightfully my own. I 
would not cheat.nor defraud my neighbor in 
anything; but that which I have earned by my 
own labor, or that which has otherwise come 
honestly and honorably into my possession, it 
is my right and it is my duty to seek for, to 
claim, and to demand as my own. The law 
always will justify me in so doing, and there 
would be no justice in any other arrangement. 
My own belongs to me. It is my right; and 
it is right for me to have my right.” 

That is true. All the law courts in the land 
will sustain a man in that position. They 
have been established for that one end—to 
maintain every individual in his just and legal 
rights. There may be corruption in the law 
courts, and it may be that it sometimes has 
happened that the ends of justice have been 
defeated by legal technicalities and infinite 
red tape; but every such case has been a pros- 
titution of their originally righteous intention 
and design. The law stands everywhere for 
the maintenance of justice and right. While 


it is true that some of the greatest scoundrels 
140 


LOVE AND ITS RIGHTS 


who ever escaped State’s prison have managed 
by natural talent and acquired shrewdness to 
maintain a legally respectable standing at the 
bar, it is equally true that some of the most 
honest and honorable men of this nation, some 
of the noblest characters this world has known, 
have been found among the lawyers who 
pleaded in the courts or who had attained 
to judicial position. They were the men who 
were most in harmony with the intention of 
their profession ; and they alone have been con- 
sistent in their practice with the design of the 
law. 

We have heard it said that lawyers do not 
make good church-members. That need not 
be true, and that ought not to be true; and of 
many lawyers we have known it was not true 
in any sense. They made as good church- 
members as any. The profession is honorable 
in itself, and may be conducted to the good 
of men and the glory of God. <A good lawyer 
will thus conduct his business; and those who 
would not make good church-members are not 
good lawyers. Yet the good lawyer who 
unites with the church ought to find in it a 
cleaner atmosphere and a higher grade of con- 
science and a loftier plane of life than there is 
in any law court in the jand. 


The law courts have to do only with legali- 
141 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


ties and moralities, and justice is the one end 
and aim of their being; but the church asks 
men not only to be moral but also to be reli- 
gious, not only to be good lawyers but also to 
be good Christians, not only to be just but also 
to be loving. If the church in this world can- 
not and does not show men that Christianity 
is something above and beyond legality, then 
the church might as well be blotted out of 
existence and the law courts could be left to 
take care of the rights and the morals of men. 
The church is composed of the disciples of 
Christ, and Christ was the incarnation of the 
spirit of love, and Paul says, “Love seeketh 
not her own.” 

All the members of the real Church of 
Christ, as the disciples of the Christ, 
will seek to reproduce in their lives the 
character of the Christ and the characteristics 
of the love which he manifested; and in so do- 
ing they will prove to all the world that they 
have within them the powers of the world to 
come, lifting them above the influence of mere 
personalities and temporalities into the con- 
sideration of universalities and eternities, lift- 
ing them out of their selfishness into godliness, 
above legalities and moralities into the spir- 
itualities of a higher realm, where the soul 


still will be absolutely just and moral in its 
142 


LOVE AND ITS RIGHTS 


behavior toward all men but no longer will set 
its affections upon things on the earth, 
whether they belong to others or whether they 
belong to itself, but, rather, will seek after 
those things which are above where Christ 
sitteth on the right hand of God. The Chris- 
tian will suffer long and be kind. The Chris- 
tian will not be envious of others’ rights or 
privileges. The Christian will not vaunt him- 
self or be puffed up. The Christian will not 
behave himself unseemly; and the Christian 
will not seek his own rights regardless of all 
consequences, but he will seek to do God’s 
will alone. 

We are anxious if possible to get at Paul’s 
meaning in this statement. That will be diffi- 
cult, we apprehend, because his statement here 
runs so exactly counter to all our natural 
prejudices and normal principles of action 
and life. Every Englishman is prone to think 
that his first duty is to stand up for his rights. 
That is what an Englishman is born into this 
world for—first of all to take care of his own 
rights. He begins to clamor for them before 
he is twenty-four hours old, and the habit 
grows upon him with the years. We Ameri- 
cans are only Englishmen in the second and 
improved edition in this respect; and we have 


fallen heir to all the English pride of posses- 
143 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


sion and sense of personal and property rights. 
The average American is ready to defend his 
rights, if it takes the last cent of his money 
and the last drop of his blood. His rights are 
his rights, and he will maintain them at the 
risk of everything he holds dear. 

It may split the church to which he belongs, 
or it may cause discord in the whole com- 
munity. It may lead into lawsuit after law- 
suit. It may result in bitterness and estrange- 
ment and hatred and slander and a thousand 
disagreeable and devilish passions and penal- 
ties; but right is right and must be main- 
tained at any cost to the bitter end. It may 
lead to a war which devastates the world and 
bankrupts the nations and postpones the com- 
ing of the kingdom of God for hundreds of 
years, but the right must triumph even though 
it be at the expense of thousands of starving 
children and hundreds of thousands of 
broken-hearted mothers and wives and mil- 
. lions of the soldier dead. A world in which 
right is maintained at any cost may be a lost 
and ruined world. If it ever is saved, it will 
be saved not in selfish insistence upon exact 
justice in every case—an eye for an eye and 
a tooth for a tooth—but by unselfish love. 

Paul had written to these Corinthians in an 


earlier chapter of this Epistle: “All things are 
144 


LOVE AND ITS RIGHTS 


lawful; but not all things are advantageous. 
All things are lawful; but not all things build 
up (the church or the community). Let no 
one seek his own but another’s interest.’ 
Now he writes, ‘Love seeketh not her own.” 
So he sets selfishness with legality to protect 
its interests over against unselfishness with 
love as its motive power. Selfishness always 
asks, “What can I have and how much can I 
keep?” Love asks, “How much can I give, 
and what will be to the eternal advantage and 
edification of all concerned ?” 

It was said of the early Christians that they 
suffered wrongs and were silent, that they 
were persecuted and yet prayed for their per- 
secutors, that they were hated and yet wished 
well to their enemies and took every oppor- 
tunity to do them good. In the Apology of 
Aristides we read, “Those who grieve them 
they comfort and make them their friends.” 
Those were the days of the great triumphs of 
the Christian faith when it won its way among 
the peoples by the exhibition of a supernatural 
love. It is the day of Christianity’s greatest 
defeat when it descends to vindictiveness and 
revenge. 

It may have been possible in the Old Testa- 
ment times for the children of God to rejoice 


11 Cor. 10. 23, 24. 
145 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


in the destruction of their enemies and the 
miseries they suffered, but what Heine called 
“the taming talisman of the cross” has made 
it impossible for any Christian to gloat over 
the temporal or the eternal wretchedness of 
any man, but only to grieve over his sin and 
the consequences of his sin. The Jews might 
exact the last ounce of flesh which was their 
contract right, but to the Christians the most 
relentless and atrocious enemy is an immortal 
soul to be won for God, a brother to be for- 
given and to be made a friend by the ceaseless 
offices of Christian love. 

One of the first German ships to cross the 
Atlantic after the armistice was the little bark 
bearing the apostle’s name, Paul. She en- 
countered terrific storms and was almost 
pounded to pieces. <A British sea captain 
came to her rescue and brought her into safe 
harbor in Halifax. It was Captain Musgrave 
of the Manchester Merchant. Who was Cap- 
tain Musgrave? He was a man who had had 
a ship sunk under him by a German submarine 
and the crew of the submarine had fired upon 
those who were escaping in the lifeboats. 
There were those who declared that no Ger- 
man mariner in distress ever would be res- 
cued by Englishmen again; but Captain Mus- 
grave was not of that sort. He forgave as 

146 


LOVE AND ITS RIGHTS 


Christ forgave. He saved as Christ would 
have saved. He was bent on turning foes into 
friends. He exemplified the spirit of Chris- 
tian brotherhood and love. 

An American steamer was sunk by a mine, 
and the crew was rescued by the men in a Ger- 
man fishing-boat. Those particular Ameri- 
cans are not likely to hate those particular 
Germans any more. The Bishop of Stepney 
tells how a little girl in East London was in 
the habit of bringing a bunch of flowers each 
Saturday night to a German lady whom she 
loved. She did so all through the war. Her 
brother went down in one of the submarined 
cruisers and the German lady hardly expected 
the flowers that week; but the girl came as 
usual the next Saturday, and in mourning, 
but bringing the flowers as before. It is 
selfishness which turns a man into a brute. 
It is love alone which can lift him to the plane 
of the divine. 

Sir Edwin Arnold once addressed the Har- 
vard students, and he said to them: “Gentle- 
men, in 1776 and 1812 you conquered your 
fathers. In 1865 you conquered your brothers. 
Will you permit an Englishman to say that 
your next victory must be over yourselves?” 
That victory is more difficult to win than ever 


a Revolutionary or a Civil War. It can be 
147 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


won only in Christian love. Did Sir Edwin 
Arnold get his wisdom from the teaching of 
Buddha or the teaching of Jesus? Buddha 
said: “To make an end of selfishness is hap- 
piness. This is the greatest happiness—to 
subdue the selfish thought of ‘I.’” Jesus said, 
“If anyone desires to come after me, let him 
deny himself and take up his cross daily, and 
let him follow me.’ 

There was a Christian man whose motto 
was, “Myself third.” God came first, and then 
his neighbor, and then himself. There was a 
woman of whom James Russell Lowell wrote, 

“So circled lives she with Love’s holy light, 
That from the shade of self she walketh free.”’ 
It can be done. Paul says, “Love seeketh not 
her own.” Love is unselfish and love “Aye 
tastes God’s honey on his holy hill.” 

The old law said, “Thou shalt not covet; 
thou shalt not seek the things which belong to 
others.” Paul says that the law of love some- 
times is, “Thou shalt not seek what belongs to 
thyself; thou must be ready to surrender thy 
rights for others’ good.” Where legality ends, 
love begins. Love is ready for sacrifice. It 
is no sacrifice to give up sin, for sin is deadly 
and damnable. It is no sacrifice to give up a 
baleful disease, for that is destroying. Sacri- 


3 Luke 9. 23. 
148 


LOVE AND ITS RIGHTS 


fice consists in giving up what is good and 
valuable and what we have earned and what 
it is right for us to have and to hold. 

Does a statesman give up his well-earned 
Jeisure for the nation’s good? It is his right 
to enjoy it, but he makes the sacrifice. Does a 
philanthropist give his hard-earned wealth to 
some benevolent enterprise? It may be his 
right to keep it, but love leads him to sacri- 
fice. Does some kindly neighbor give up the 
ease and comfort of her own home to watch 
by night and to market and cook by day for 
the sick and helpless poor? There is no neces- 
sity laid upon her except the constraining 
power of love. The law of love is a higher law 
than the law of rights. 

It is too high a law for the natural man to 
grasp it readily. There is a manuscript of 
this Epistle in the Vatican Library at Rome 
in which the scribe has inserted another “not” 
in this sentence. He was surprised to read 
here, “Love seeketh not her own,” and he was 
sure there must be some mistake about that, 
and so he corrected the sentence to read, “Love 
seeketh not things not her own.” That meant, 
“Love does not covet,” and that went back to 
the standard of the Old Testament. Paul 
shows us a more excellent way, not the way of 


law but the way of love. 
149 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


In California there was a little church of 
twelve members. It had been a flourishing 
charge with a membership of fifty or sixty; 
but that was some eight or ten years before. 
At that time it had in its congregation two 
superannuated preachers, members of the 
same Conference, who were nextdoor neigh- 
bors to each other. One of them had an 
orchard full of fruit trees, and a row of cherry 
trees next to his neighbor’s fence. The other 
man, who happened to be on the eastern and 
sunny side, had a vegetable garden; and he 
planted a row of eucalyptus trees next to the 
dividing fence. The eucalyptus tree grows 
very rapidly, absorbs a great deal of moisture 
from the ground, and because of its height 
casts a rather long stretch of shade. 

The preacher on the shady side of the fence 
soon found that his cherry trees did not grow 
well or produce well in the neighborhood of 
that row of the eucalypti; and he thought his 
neighbor ought to cut the trees down. He had 
a right to the sunshine above the ground and 
he had a right to the moisture which was 
beneath it, but those eucalyptus trees would 
send their roots under the fence beneath the 
ground and they shut off all the sunshine 
above it. On the other hand, the other 


preacher thought he had a perfect right to do 
150 


LOVE AND ITS RIGHTS 


what he pleased on his own territory. He had 
his own perfectly good reasons for wanting 
that row of eucalyptus trees there, and he was 
satisfied with them; and if he was, everybody 
else ought to be. Each man had his rights, 
and each man felt justified in maintaining 
them; and there it was that trouble began. 
The two neighbors quarreled, and then the 
whole neighborhood around them got to quar- 
reling, and then the church took sides; and 
matters went on from bad to worse till they 
had a church trial. The trial did not mend 
matters in the least. It only intensified the 
feeling on both sides; and the final result was 
that the church went to pieces. About forty 
of the members went over into the Presby- 
terian Church. Others left the church alto- 
gether; and for years they had great difficulty 
in keeping up any organization. It was 
eight or ten years after the church trial 
when we first became acquainted with these 
people, and the eucalyptus trees had been cut 
down long before and their roots had rotted 
away in the ground; but nobody in that com- 
munity had forgotten them. A high spite 
fence had been built between these two neigh- 
bors. There were only twelve members left in 
the church; but those twelve members were 


about equally divided, six of them on the one 
151 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


side and six of them on the other side of that 
fence. If they ever peeped through the cracks 
at each other, it was only to see if the other 
folks were not some way or other invading 
their rights. 

Both of those preachers were good men. 
They had both done good service in the church. 
Each of them had many good friends. They 
were good Americans too, and good lawyers; 
and they knew their rights and they were 
ready to maintain them. Many of us are like 
them. Many of our church-members are con- 
tent to live on the plane of legality rather than 
in the experience of Pauline love. Two church- 
members in Kansas had a quarrel about a 
sheep. Each man was sure he was in the right 
of the matter; and they could not settle it 
between them and they carried it into the 
courts. It was a long and bitter contest, and 
it was appealed from court to court. Each 
man became more and more determined to 
have the right of the case win in the end, that 
he might be justified in the eyes of the whole 
community. They retained the best of legal 
ability, and kept the matter going for months 
and for years; and in the end it cost each of 
them something like five thousand dollars to 
determine to whom that sheep belonged. Pos- 


sibly the sheep was worth ten dollars; but it 
152 


LOVE AND ITS RIGHTS 


was worth ten thousand dollars to determine 
the rights in the case. They believed in peace 
with justice, peace won through litigation and 
fighting; and that meant that they had no 
peace at all. 

These are extreme illustrations it may be, in 
the extent of the damage done, but the prin- 
ciple they illustrate is of very common occur- 
rence. Somebody in the community has his 
feelings hurt, feels that he has been insulted 
or slighted or wronged in some way or an- 
other; and then for a year he will not speak 
to the offending party. He passes him coldly 
by on the street, and says, “He must apologize 
to me or make some reparation before I ever 
will consider him worth my notice,’ when he 
ought to go up to him and say, “We never 
ought to hate each other. Here is my hand; 
we are brethren, and we both expect to go to 
heaven.” 


Il. RIGHTS SACRIFICED 


Love will do that. If it be necessary to pre- 
serve peace of heart or peace of family, peace 
in the community or peace in the Church of 
God, love will be willing to forego its own 
preference, to surrender its own rights. Per- 
fect love seeketh not its own honor first of all, 


and always; but it seeks God’s honor first of 
153 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


all, and always. With it the supreme desire 
is not to have its own rights; the supreme de- 
sire is that God may be glorified and his will 
may be done and his kingdom may come on 
this earth and his name be hallowed among 
men. If in any case to insist on our rights 
will clearly lead.to lasting damage to the 
cause of the Christ, will hinder the spread of 
his kingdom and will bring dishonor upon his 
name, Love will be ready at once to say, “I 
love the Lord with all my heart and my neigh- 
bor as myself, and I am willing to surrender 
my selfish desires to their good.” 

Is not that what Paul intends to say here? 
Love seeks God’s honor and the neighbor’s 
salvation. Love will not seek its own inter- 
ests in preference to these. Paul says: “It 
is good to have our own rights, but sometimes 
it may be better to surrender them. It may 
be legally right to maintain them, when it 
will be religiously right to let them go. The 
standard in our lives ought to be a loftier 
standard than the legal standard; it ought to 
be the regal standard of unselfish love to God 
and man.” 

Abraham had been called into the land of 
Canaan, and the Lord had promised it to him 
for his own inheritance. His nephew Lot 


journeyed with him for a time; but they had 
154 


LOVE AND ITS RIGHTS 


so many flocks and herds and tents that it be- 
came difficult for them to find pasture ground 
in any one place sufficient for both of them. 
The herdmen of Lot quarreled with the herd- 
men of Abraham, and there was increasing 
friction and unpleasantness between them. 
Then Abraham said to Lot: ‘Let there be no 
strife, | pray thee, between me and thee, and 
between my herdmen and thy herdmen; for 
we be brethren. It seems necessary now that 
we separate from each other. Let us divide 
the pasture lands not occupied by the 
Canaanites in some peaceable and satisfactory 
manner, that we may part from each other in 
good will.” 

Abraham might have said, “The Lord has 
promised me this land; and I think you ought 
to go down into Egypt or elsewhere, and leave 
me in undisturbed and undisputed posses- 
sion.” Possibly it might have been all right 
for him to say that; but Abraham was the 
friend of God, and his spirit was not of that 
selfish and arbitrary sort. Then, again, he 
might have said: “I am the uncle, I am the 
older, and I surely ought to have the prefer- 
ence in this matter. I will take the larger 
portion, or at least the better portion, and you 
ought to be satisfied with any share I am will- 


ing to leave you.” We do not see how Lot 
155 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


rightfully could have complained, if Abraham 
had said that; but Abraham was too nobly 
unselfish and loving to make any such propo- 
sition. He said to Lot, “Take your first 
choice; go where you please. I will be con- 
tent with what is left for my portion.” 
Luther says that if Abraham had consulted 
a lawyer about that division of pasture, the 
lawyer would have told him, “Take your 
chance, and hold on to all the property you 
can.” Many a modern church-member would 
have been disposed to say: “Abraham, you: 
know little or nothing about this world or its 
ways. You never can trust that selfish young 
nephew. If you give him the chance, he will 
be sure to take all the fertile valley, all the 
plain of the Jordan which is like the garden 
of the Lord. The only way to get through this 
world is to stand up for your rights. If you 
do not do it, you will be cheated every time.” 
Abraham consulted no lawyer, and he sought 
not his own. The friend of God had some- 
thing of God’s spirit of unselfish love. His 
one desire was that there might be peace 
among brethren, even at the cost of self-denial. 
Lot looked out for his own interests, chose 
the fertile Jordan valley, pitched his tents to- 
ward Sodom and Gomorrah, afterward became 


rich enough to have a city residence and to be 
156 


LOVE AND ITS RIGHTS 


a great man in the community; but then went 
through worse than a Yokohama conflagra- 
tion, and lost nearly everything he had. Abra- 
ham sought not his own, but unselfishly sur- 
rendered his just rights; and God made that 
man his friend, made him the father of the 
faithful, gave him riches and honor and many 
an unexpected blessing. 

Love seeketh not her own. Jonathan loved 
David as his own soul; and he gave to David 
his robe and his sword and his girdle in 
covenant sign that they should be as one. 
David grew in popularity with the people, and 
Saul was very jealous, thinking that David 
might aspire to be king; but Jonathan loved 
David and he envied him not and he sought 
not his own. He protected David from his 
father’s attempts upon his life. He was loyal 
to David’s interests always, and at last he 
gave up to him the throne. Love is capable 
of such self-sacrifice; and only that love is 
worthy of the name which is ready to prove 
itself in self-sacrifice of that sort. 

Take the mother’s love for an example. So 
many of the things which Paul says of love 
in this chapter are so clearly true of a 
mother’s love. It is long-suffering and kind, 
not easily provoked. It thinketh no evil, 


beareth all things, believeth all things, 
157 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


hopeth all things, endureth all things; and 
surely it is true of a mother that she seeketh 
not her own. The mother nourishes the little 
one, cares for it, guards it, watches it by night 
and day, devotes herself to it unceasingly till 
it has grown old enough to care in part for 
itself. Then she prays for it, works for it, 
saves for it, and sacrifices for it, that it may 
have food and clothing and schooling; and 
for many years she goes without many things 
that the child may have everything it needs. 

Always unselfish and self-denying, sympa- 
thetic and kind, the mother’s love always is 
true and always is to be relied upon. She 
loves because she must love; and if she con- 
sume her energies for a lifetime and receive 
in the end only ingratitude and selfish dis- 
regard of her own wishes and love, she loves 
on still. That is a mother’s love; the love 
which seeks not her own but the child’s good, 
the love which surrenders her own good to the 
good of the child. 

That was the spirit of the apostle Paul. 
Have we ever noticed the difference between 
Saul and Paul in that regard? When his 
name was Saul he says of himself, “I went 
about to establish my own righteousness.’ 
He was very religious at that time, but what 


8 Rom. 10. 3. 
158 


LOVE AND ITS RIGHTS 


was the inspiring motive of all his religious 
observances? He was not so anxious about 
the kingdom of God, but he was seeking his 
own honor and his own exaltation; he was 
going about to establish his own righteous- 
ness. After his name had been changed to 
Paul there was an end to all self-seeking with 
him. He wrote to the Thessalonians, “Not of 
men sought we glory, neither of you nor yet 
of others; we were willing to have imparted 
unto you not the gospel of God only but also 
our own souls, because ye were dear unto 
us.’”4 

That is the apostle who wrote these words, 
“Love seeketh not its own.” His own life is 
an illustration of its meaning. “For ye re- 
member, brethren, our labor and travail, for 
laboring night and day because we would not 
be chargeable unto any of you, we preached 
unto you the gospel of God,’ and they did 
remember how this man with splendid abili- 
ties never had sought for his own advance- 
ment in the church or the nation. They re- 
membered how this man who might have 
ranked high in the Sanhedrin or have attained 
high distinction in a professional career was 
content to work with his needle late into the 


41 Thess. 2. 6, 8. 
51 Thess. 2. 9. 





159 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


nights, sewing upon the coarse tent material 
that he might have enough to live on while he 
preached the gospel through the day. They 
remembered how he had perseveringly sacri- 
ficed self because the souls of the brethren 
were unsaved and so dear. They remembered, 
and they believed Paul when he said, “My self 
is crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; 
yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.’* 

Would our brethren believe that testimony 
from us? They will, if they have seen in our 
lives not self-seeking but self-sacrifice. Christ 
sought not his own. He left the throne of 
power and came to a birth in a manger and 
a death of shame. Had he sought his own, he 
never would have left heaven. Had he sought 
his own, he would have stepped down from 
the cross. If Christ so loved us, we ought even 
so to love the brethren. 





* Gal. 2. 20. 


160 


CHAPTER VI 
LOVE AND TEMPER 


WE said concerning the preceding clause, 
“Love seeketh not its own,” that we considered 
it the most difficult statement we had found 
thus far in this chapter. We considered it 
difficult because it ran so exactly counter to 
all of our natural prejudices and our usual 
principles of action and life. The average 
American is ready to think that it is his first 
duty to stand up for his rights; and the most 
of us put in most of our time in seeking for, 
claiming, and demanding that which we con- 
sider our own. It was to be expected, there- 
fore, that the sentiment to which the apostle 
there gave expression would not commend it- 
self immediately to the average man. It 
would appeal only to Christians of mature 
spiritual experience. 

We knew that the love which seeketh not its 
own would seem to many or most too visionary 
and impracticable, too unworldly ever to be 
exercised in the social and business relations 
of our ordinary life; but there was the truth 
as stated by the apostle Paul, the plain, 


straightforward, unqualified declaration that 
161 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


love seeketh not its own. We tried to make 
it clear that while society and morality and 
the law courts of the land might be satisfied 
with the legal standard of perfect justice in 
the relations of life, the Christ would not be 
satisfied with that standard, and Christianity 
and the churches of the land never ought to 
be satisfied with anything less than the regal 
standard of perfect love. The essence of sin 
is selfishness; the essence of love is self-sacri- 
fice. The man who loves the Lord with all his 
heart and his neighbor as himself will be ready 
to make any sacrifice which will glorify God 
and assist in the salvation of a neighbor’s 
soul, will be ready even to surrender his own 
rights if in so doing he can forward higher 
interests like these. The man who seeks not 
his own in that sense will be the man who has 
made an entire consecration and enjoys full 
salvation and is unworldly in that he is Christ- 
like in daily conversation and life. 

We believe that it is both expedient and 
right to present the truth in such a manner 
as will commend itself immediately to every 
man’s conscience and judgment, if that be pos- 
sible; but if for any reason that may seem 
an impossibility, we believe that the only duty 
is to present the truth at any rate; and that 


was about all we could do with that statement. 
162 


LOVE AND TEMPER 


With what a sigh of relief we could have 
turned to Paul’s next statement if we could 
only read it as it is in the King James ver- 
sion—“Love is not easily provoked.” Every- 
body would agree at once that to be easily pro- 
voked, to fly all to pieces at the least provoca- 
tion, is not becoming in any Christian and is 
an unlovely characteristic in any life. Every 
sinner will be ready to say, “A man ought to 
have some control of his temper, so as not 
easily to be irritated and provoked,” and every 
church-member will be ready to assent: “Yes, 
we ought to control our tempers in some meas- 
ure at least. Of course it is only natural that 
we should lose our tempers sometimes; every- 
body does that; but we ought not to be losing 
them continually, nor, indeed, very often. We 
ought to show that we are not easily pro- 
voked.” Every one is ready to assert: “I am 
not easily provoked myself; but when I am, 
then it is time to look out. It will not be safe 
to get in my way until I cool down again.” If 
that was all that Paul said here about Love, 
his statement would be acceptable to every- 
body. 


I. A MISTRANSLATION 


However, Paul never said, “Love is not 


easily provoked.” Our Authorized or King 
163 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


James Version gives us an absolutely mislead- 
ing translation of the Greek when it says that. 
The fact of the case is that that word “easily” 
has absolutely no right in a translation of 
Paul’s statement. In the original Greek there 
are only two words, od tapotivera, which 
might be rendered, “Love never has a 
paroxysm, a fit of temper.” That was what 
Paul said, and nothing more than that. 

The Vulgate put it, “non wrritatur,’ “Love 
is not irritated,’ which was no better than 
the King James translation and just about as 
far from the truth. Luther translated, “Sie 
lasset sich nicht erbittern,’ “She does not 
allow herself to become embittered,” and that 
was an improvement, since it stated the fact 
in the case, even if it was not exactly the fact 
stated by Paul. The Revised Versions correct 
the King James Version by omitting the word 
“easily” and giving us the mistranslation, 
“Love is not provoked,’ which is just as bad 
as the older version and which does not state 
the truth; for Love is provoked whenever ade- 
quate occasion arises, and it ought to be when- 
ever outrage and injustice and cruelty furnish 
it ample reason for so being; but as Paul says, 
it ought not to be and it never is provoked 
into a paroxysm, a fit, loss of self-control. 


Love is provoked, but Love remains master of 
164 


LOVE AND TEMPER 


itself under every provocation. Love may be 
angry, righteously angry, but it will be angry 
and sin not. 

In what is possibly the oldest translation 
ever made into English, the translator ren- 
dered this clause, “Love is not stirred to 
wrath.” The New Testaments printed in 1547, 
1548, 1549, and 1566 all translated, “Love is 
not provoked to anger.” These were mistrans- 
lations and mistruths. Then came the King 
James Version, inserting the word “easily” 
improperly and without any authority, and 
making it read, “Love is not easily provoked.” 
The Coverdale, Matthews, Cranmer, and 
Geneva editions which followed corrected this 
mistranslation, as our own Revised Versions 
have done; but their translation misinter- 
prets Paul, for he did not say that love was 
not easily provoked and he did not say that 
love never is provoked. He said that love 
never is provoked into a paroxysm, never per- 
mits itself to lose its self-control. 

How did it happen that the word “easily” 
came into our English Bibles in the first place? 
John Wesley suggests that it may have been 
to excuse the apostle Paul himself; for we read 
in the book of Acts that he and Barnabas dis- 
agreed about a certain matter, and the Greek 
reads, éyévero dé rrapozvopos, literally, ““There was 

165 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


a paroxysm, a fit of anger.’ The word is the 
same which we find here; and if both of the 
apostles lost their temper and their self-con- 
trol, then Paul’s doctrine as expressed in this 
clause and his practice as narrated in the 
one instance at least in the book of Acts would 
be at variance with each other. John Wesley 
is inclined to think that it was Barnabas alone 
who had a fit of anger, and that Paul was not 
at fault at all in the matter and therefore 
needs no excuse. 

Adam Clarke, on the other hand, just hints 
that the word “easily” might have been added 
by his Majesty himself; for King James might 
have thought that it would be so much more 
comfortable and acceptable to the majority 
of men if the passage should read, “Love is 
not easily provoked, but, of course, there are 
cases when it may be provoked, as we all 
know.” If that be true, he should have re- 
membered the statement there at the end of 
the book of Revelation which reads, “If any 
man shall add unto these things, God shall 
add unto him the plagues which are written 
in this book; and if any man shall take away 
from the words of the book of this prophecy, 
God shall take away his part out of the book 
of life, and out of the holy city, and from the 


1 Acts 15. 39. 
166 


LOVE AND TEMPER 


things which are written in this book.”? That 
is as likely to be true of any other book in the 
canon as it is of the Apocalypse. Anyway, in 
the interests of truth and accuracy, that arbi- 
trary addition of the word “easily” in our 
King James Version has been rightfully re- 
jected by the translators of both earlier and 
later times. However, not much has been 
gained, if we still translate Paul into the state- 
ment of an untruth. 


II. PAvuL’s MEANING 

Paul said, “‘H dyarn ob rapogiveras, Love is not 
provoked into a paroxysm, beyond its own self- 
control’; and that means that we cannot 
excuse any uncontrolled burst of passion in 
one who professes to have Christian love. 
Adam Clarke was right when he said, ‘““When 
the man who possesses this love gives way 
to provocation, he loses the balance of his 
soul, and grieves the Spirit of God. In that 
instant he ceases from loving God with all 
his soul, mind, and strength; and surely 
if he gets embittered against his neighbor, he 
does not love him as himself.” The deyil is 
hate incarnate, and hell is hate on fire. Jesus 
was love incarnate, and heayen will be love 
entire. 


~ 2 Rey, 22. 18, 19. 
167 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


Paul asserts, as the ideal, the complete 
eradication of all unholy passions, all sinful 
tempers, all uncontrolled paroxysms of wrath 
from the soul; and he asserts the necessity of 
the complete elimination of any display of 
these things from the Christian’s inter- 
course with other men. Only that life which 
blesses is itself blessed. When a man in a fit 
of anger makes the air about him blue. with 
profanity and falls to cursing anything and 
everything within sight he is heaping up wrath 
against the day of wrath, for curses are like 
chickens and come home to roost. A curse 
sours in the mouth and festers in the heart and 
rots in the brain which forged it. Wherefore 
' Jesus said to men, “Bless, and curse not. » 

There may be an honest difference of opin- 
ion, which may be entirely consistent with 
love. There may be a righteous indignation, 
which is but the expression of sincere though 
outraged love. There may be Christian 
rebuke, administered in a spirit of love. There 
is such a thing as holy wrath, which the 
apostle Paul attributes to God himself, though 
God is love. We read of the anger of the Lord 
in scores of passages in the Old Testament; 
and Paul tells us that the wrath of God is re- 
vealed from heaven against all ungodliness 


and unrighteousness of men. ‘From this 
168 


LOVE AND TEMPER 


notion of wrath, when it is applied to God, we 
must, of course, remove all that pollutes hu- 
man wrath, personal resentment, the moral 
perturbation which gives to the manifestations 
of indignation the character of revenge. In 
God, who is the living Good, wrath appears 
as the holy disapprobation of evil and the firm 
resolve to destroy it.” We may safely enough 
assert all of these things; and yet it remains 
true that all unholy passions, all sinful 
tempers, all uncontrolled bursts of rage are 
inconsistent with the profession of Christian 
love. Love never has a paroxysm of wrath. 
The trouble about the paroxysm is that it 
means a loss of self-control, in which the 
higher self is dethroned and the lower self 
becomes dominant. He who indulges in a 
Berserker rage is blind to consequences and 
deaf to to reason. He sees red for the time being 
and hears ‘nothing but the roaring in his own 


ents ae: e 


ears. _He runs amuck wa absolute di csr’ sregard 


ee 


evil Paine are) in ontcar A eaBy, hold the 


ge OT OO a Re 


reins and, like Jeh ehu, they drive furiously. In 
a Be dininutes ith their reckless abandon may 
work irreparable havoc in the home or in the 
community. That paroxysm of the earth 
which we call an earthquake may last only 


a few minutes, but a whole city may be laid in 
169 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


ruins by it. That paroxysm of the sky which 
we calla tornado may be gone in a little while, 
but a whole harvest may be devastated by it. 
A preacher’s fit of temper may last only a few 
moments, but the ill-advised words spoken in 
that paroxysm of rage may nullify all good 
effects of his preaching for months and years 
to come. 

Drummond said, “For embittering life, for 
breaking tip communities, for destroying the 
most sacred relationships, for devastating 
homes, for withering up men and women, for 
taking the bloom of childhood, in short, for 
sheer, gratuitous, misery-producing power, — 


this influence stands alone. . . . We are i: 
often inclined. to look upon bad temper as a h 


very harmless infirmity. We speak of it as 
being a mere infirmity of nature, not a thing 
to take into very serious account in estimat- 
ing a man’s character, a kind of accident, a 
matter of temperament, and so on. And yet 
right here, right in the middle of this analysis 
of love, Paul plants that thing; and the Bible 
again and again comes to that little infirmity, 
as we call it, and makes a good deal of it. It 
is not a little infirmity to smile at. . . . It 
is not to be looked upon as an accident of 
temperament; but it is a sin—one of the black- 


est of all the sins. It is the symptom of an 
170 


LOVE AND TEMPER 


unloving nature at bottom; a want of pa- 
tience, a want of kindness, a want of gener- 
osity, a want of humility, a want of courtesy, 
a want of unselfishness—all are symbolized in 
one flash of evil temper. It is the revelation 
of what is inside of a man, and therefore the 
man who has that must have his whole nature 
sweetened. It is not enough to deal with the 
temper. You must go to the root and sweeten 
the whole nature, and then temper will die 
away of itself.” 

We know that is true. We knew a mother 
who had as hasty a temper as any woman is 
likely to possess. She was a good mother 
always, but she naturally was so susceptible to 
any slight or insult, so quick to take offense, 
that we can remember the time when we used 
to see her face flush and her eyes flash in 
temper almost every day in the home, and 
there were times when she would sulk in 
moody wrath for days or weeks at a stretch. 
She took her temper before God; and his grace 
gave her the victory over it. For years before 
her death we never saw a trace of that old un- 
controlled wrath. She had the same delicacy 
of susceptibility. She often had her feelings 
hurt. We have seen the tears in her eyes many 
times; but we never saw a flash of the old evil 
temper. The depths of her spirit were un- 

171 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


ruffied to the very end. She would suffer long 
and be kind. The fruit of the spirit within her 
was gentleness, goodness, meekness, love, joy, 
peace. She naturally had as much temper as 
any woman we have intimately known. She 
had complete control over it in the experience 
of Christian love. We know that to be true, 
because we lived with her in the home. 

God will help us to eradicate from our 
natures all that is contrary to the spirit of 
love. He can save us from evil tempers, and 
a salvation is not worth much which will not 
do that for us; and if we show that in the 
severest temptations our love is not provoked 
into uncontrolled anger, that will do more to 
bring the world to the feet of our Christ, more 
to bring all of our unconverted friends into 
the fold of the Lord than anything we can 
say and write on the subject. 


172 


CHAPTER VII 
LOVE AND EVIL 


PAUL says next about love that it od Aoyiera 
To xaxov, A proper translation of these words 
will help us as much here as in the clause 
preceding. 


I. Tor Proper TRANSLATION 


We saw that in the preceding clause the 
translation, “Love is not easily provoked,” 
toned down the apostle’s meaning and totally 
misrepresented it by making it too mild; and 
the translation, “Love is not provoked,” did 
not state the truth of the matter and did not 
state what Paul had said. Love is provoked, 
and rightly provoked, many a time, but it 
never is provoked into a paroxysm or loss of 
self-control. That is exactly what Paul said, 
ov naposiverat. In this next following clause, 
“Love thinketh no evil,’ is too sweeping a 
statement to be a truthful one, and it is not 
an accurate translation of Paul’s words. It 
says more than Paul said or intended to say; 
and the value of his putting of the truth is 
lessened just as much by overstatement as by 


understatement. 
173 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


Many people have read these words, ‘‘Love 
thinketh no evil,” and have said at once: “That 
is impossible. That is impracticable. In a 
world like this, one must think evil of some 
things and of some people. Can I see a man 
indulging in every vice and not think evil of 
him? Can I see a woman traducing all her 
neighbors and not think evil of her? Can I 
see a nation selling its soul for commercial 
advantage and precipitating a war for con- 
quest and aggression and not think evil of it? 
Can I see a church currying favor with the 
world by becoming jingoistic and militaristic 
and thus denying its Master the Prince of 
Peace and crucifying him afresh, and not think 
evil of it? If love thinks no evil, love must be 
blind to the facts; and if love is blind to the 
facts, love is merely a fool.” 

It may be a relief to people who feel like 
that to know that the apostle Paul never said, 
“Love thinketh no evil,” but he said that Love 
ov Aoyicerat TO Kxaxédv, does not take the evil for 
granted, does not reckon upon it without good 
and sufficient reason, does not begin with the 
supposition of evil but comes to the conclusion 
of evil only upon the basis of facts. That 
procedure will commend itself to most minds 
at once. It will seem both wise and religious. 


174 


LOVE AND EVIL 


II. Lover Looxs ror Goop 


This is one of the most lovable character- 
istics of Love which Paul has put into this 
chapter. “Love does not reckon on evil, does 
not calculate that evil can be found if it be 
looked for long enough and _ diligently 
enough.” On the contrary it is prone to see 
all the good which can be seen in everything. 
Love is gladdened by goodness. Love is no 
carping critic, no constitutional fault-finder. 
Love has no proclivities toward gossip and 
Slander. Love is an optimist, always expect- 
ing the best possible under the circumstances, 
and always seeing something good even in 
seeming evil. 

Love never calls sour sweet nor black white 
nor evil good. Love always is honest in deal- 
ing with itself and with others. It is just, but 
it is charitable as well. It never takes evil 
for granted without sufficient proof. It never 
supposes a bad motive when such is not clearly 
apparent. It never reasons out or infers any- 
thing to a neighbor’s discredit. It never 
busies itself in imagining evil behind genuine 
good. That is what the apostle seems to in- 
tend when he says, “Love does not reckon on 
evil.” 


Then he may have had this added meaning 
175 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


in mind. Love does not keep an account-book 
with a list of all the evils committed against 
it. It would have no use for such a list. It 
does not care to remember them. God is love, 
and God forgets! We are assured that 
Omniscient Love forgets our sins when we 
repent. It has been suggested that there is 
a morality of memory, and that a good mem- 
ory is manifest quite as clearly in the things 
a man is able to forget as in the things he is 
able to remember. If a man forgets the wrong 
he does, that is the token of a sleepy con- 
science; but if he forgets the wrong done to 
him, that is the token of a large heart. 
Possibly we can realize the lovableness of 
this characteristic best by looking at its oppo- 
site. There are those who seem to think 
only evil. They are not able to think any good 
of anybody or anything. They see spots on 
the sun. They would find blemishes on their 
mother’s face, even if they had to take a micro- 
scope to assist them in the search. They have 
noses for nuisances, and no pleasant perfume 
ever seems to make any impression upon them. 
As one dog knows when another dog has been 
around and scents him from afar, as any beast 
smells out another of its kind, so only mean 
and worthless natures nose around to find out 


another’s guilt and rejoice in it when found. 
176 


LOVE AND EVIL 


The rejoicing proves affinity with the deed, re- 
lationship with the doer. 

Slanderers and gossips are foul-mouthed, 
for they eat dirt and that does not digest well 
in any man’s stomach. They have eyes like an 
owl which is blind to all the sunlit features 
of the landscape, but sharp-sighted to see all 
which lies in the shadow. They seem to think 
that their superior clearness of vision is 
proved by their suspicion of hidden faults. 
They would mistrust the purest man who ever 
lived. They would find some sinister motive 
behind every righteous deed. They would 
slander a saint. They would crucify the 
Christ. In spite of all his purity and love they 
would call him a blasphemer and reviler and 
would be sure that he was possessed by Beelze- 
bub. They would see only flaws and faults in 
his character. They would think only evil 
about him. 

They seem made to believe in the bad. They 
are in every community; and the disciples of 
the Christ, like their Master, must endure 
their misconceptions and misrepresentations, 
their slanders and their lies. They are of their 
father, the devil; and like him they are the 
accusers of the brethren all the time. They 
are described in the book of Proverbs. They 
wink with their eyes. They speak with their 

177 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


feet. They make signs with their fingers. 
Forwardness is in their heart. They sow dis- 
cord. They “devise evil continually.” That 
is exactly what Paul says Love does not do, 
ov Aovigerar TO Kakév, 


III. Love Is No SLANDERER 


In the first chapter of the book of Job we are 
introduced to a scene in the courts of heaven. 
The sons of God came to present themselves 
before the Lord, and Satan came also among 
them. The Lord said unto Satan, “Hast thou 
considered my servant Job, that there is none 
like him in the earth, one that feareth God and 
escheweth evil?’ Satan sneered and said, 
“He may be all that you say he is; but if so, 
he has very good reason to be. You have 
blessed him on every hand, and he serves you 
because you are good to him, and he finds that 
it pays him to do it; but if you take his bless- 
ings away from him, Job will curse you to 
your very face.” 

When Satan said that, he was a con- 
temptible liar, the accuser of a just and 
righteous man. The possessions were swept 
away at a stroke, but Job did not curse God. 
He said, “The Lord gave, and the Lord 





1 Job 1. 8. 
178 


LOVE AND EVIL 


hath taken away; blessed be the name of the 
Lord.’”” 

In the twelfth chapter of the book of Revela- 
tion we are again introduced to a scene in the 
courts of heaven. John sees in prophetic 
vision the time when Satan is cast out, and 
then he hears a loud voice, saying in heaven, 
“Now is come salvation and strength, and the 
kingdom of our God, and the power of his 
Christ; for the accuser of our brethren is cast 
down, which accused them before God day 
and night.’ That is the biblical conception 
of Satan’s constant employment, slandering 
the saints before the throne on high; and that 
is the constant employment of his children 
here, slandering the saints everywhere in this 
world. The accuser of the brethren he is; the 
accusers of the brethren they are. It is devil- 
ish in him and it is devilish in them. To give 
no man credit for a word honestly spoken or 
a good deed unselfishly done is characteristic 
of the Father of lies; and that characteristic 
runs through the whole family. 

The characteristic of love is the exact oppo- 
site of this. Love is no condor, looking only 
for carrion and feeding only on filth. The 
condor flies yonder at an incredible height, 

2 Job 1. 21. | 


3 Rev. 12. 10. 
179 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


five or six miles up in the air, and he sweeps 
on seemingly tireless wings here and there, 
and his telescopic vision takes in the whole 
land; but he always looks downward and he 
sees nothing of the beauties of the landscape 
and he cares nothing for the evidences of 
vigor and life anywhere. He sees that weak- 
ened member of the flock or the herd who 
staggers in the line or falls behind the rest 
and then lies down to die. He was but a speck 
there in the blue sky, but straight as an arrow 
he comes swiftly sweeping down upon the 
prey. Then out of the dim distance another 
speck appears, and from the opposite point 
of the compass another and another and yet 
another. Hoarsely screaming, they settle 
down upon the carcass, and rend the rough 
hide. They push with their feet and flap with 
their wings and with beak and claws they 
tear their repulsive repast. They gorge them- 
selves until they are too heavy to rise any more 
on their wings. It is a picture of the condors 
of the Andes at their feast. 

We know of nothing so revolting and dis- 
gusting as that; unless it be a gathering of 
gossips, an assembly of slanderers, who have 
scented some bit of delicious scandal and by 
Some strange and inexplicable instinct have 


come together from the four points of the com- 
180 


LOVE AND EVIL 


pass to discuss it. They roll the salacious 
news as a sweet morsel under their tongue, 
they rend the reputation as, with coarse beak 
and claws, they gorge themselves in a perfect 
mass of corruption. A condor of the Andes 
is more worthy of respect than characters of 
that sort. Nothing is further removed from 
perfect love. 

The dog which fetches will also carry. The 
talebearer who brings you a slander about 
your neighbor will carry on a slander about 
you to your neighbor. They used to say that 
a scandal-monger was as bad as a scandal- 
maker and it has been suggested that a tale- 
hearer is as bad as a talebearer and they both 
ought to be hanged, the one by the ear and the 
other by the tongue. 


TV. Love Is Not Sourgep 


It is one of the greatest mysteries imagin- 
able that there are people who make a profes- 
sion of the experience of perfect love, of which 
the apostle Paul says, “Love reckoneth not 
evil,’ and yet they are constitutional fault- 
finders and critics, dyspeptic pessimists of the 
most confirmed type, soured on the church and 
soured on humanity, at outs with the brethren 


and at outs with the race. You talk with them 
181 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


for ten minutes and you will find that they 
are ready to accuse everybody and slander 
everything and blacken all reputations; and 
if you believe what they tell you, you must 
come to the conclusion that the church is a 
hive of hypocrites and all of its services smell 
of brimstone, and that the devil himself is in 
the pulpit and plenty of his imps are in the 
pews. The world outside is no better; it is a 
seething mass of corruption, hurtling head- 
long into hell. 

We talked with a man of that stamp half 
an hour on the street corner. He has pro- 
fessed the experience of perfect love for many 
years; but listening to his conversation for 
that whole half hour, we were not able to 
discover the slightest trace of even the most 
imperfect love in a single word which he 
uttered. He was cranky and contrary, a spir- 
itual pessimist, a dyspeptic in both stomach 
and soul. It was a fact that his breath was so 
bad that it soured the whole atmosphere for 
ten feet around him; and it was a fact that 
his spirit was as sour as his breath. We lis- 
tened to him for that half hour, and we had 
our worst spell of the blues in six months. It 
was worse than the blues; it was the black- 
ness of darkness which was settling down 


upon us. After half an hour of it we could 
182 


LOVE AND EVIL 


stand it no longer. We excused ourselves 
rather abruptly, and managed to get away 
from him around the corner; and when we 
had gotten half a block away we were 
astonished to find that the sun was still shin- 
ing and the world was still just about as good 
as it ever had been. 

We have been happier ever since we had 
that talk with that professed Christian and 
possessor of the experience of perfect love. 
We have been so profoundly thankful to God 
that we did not have to live with him, only 
talk to him occasionally for half an hour. For 
years that man has been the chief barrier in 
the community to everybody else who was 
seeking to know the heights of Christian love. 
They were so prone to say, “If that is the 
experience, Good Lord, deliver us from any- 
thing like it.” That is not the experience. 
Tennyson’s “Maud” was described as “dead 
perfection, nothing more.’ What she lacked 
was love. This perfection which is wholly 
lacking in love is a perfection not only dead 
but rotting. 

The spirit of perfect love is the spirit of the 
Christ. We find that, talking to him for half 
an hour, we get our soul full of sunshine and 
full of peace. Love is long-suffering and kind, 


is not continuously provoked, and is not for- 
183 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


ever thinking evil and finding fault. Love is 
no accuser and slanderer, no constitutional 
critic or theological pessimist. Love will call 
everything by its right name, will call a spade 
a spade, will recognize and rebuke evil when- 
ever and wherever it may be present; but love 
will not be suspecting evil always. Its dis- 
position will be neither suspicious nor un- 
charitable. We believe in a perfect love which 
sweetens the whole nature, instead of souring 
it. We believe that perfect love will be an 
optimist always, with sunny countenance and 
cheerful disposition and helpful presence 
everywhere. 

There are professors of perfect love who are 
neither long-suffering nor kind. They are the 
first to get impatient, quick to see any fault, 
and unkind to remark it. There are professors 
of perfect love who are continually vaunting 
themselves, and are puffed up over their own 
profession. They spend all the time in prais- 
ing God for their own goodness, and praying 
God for their own blessing, and finding fault 
with their brethren for not doing the same 
thing. There was a good old rabbi who had 
twelve sons; and in the watches of the night 
one of them woke him up to say, “Behold, my 
eleven brothers lie sleeping, and I am the only 
one who wakens to praise and pray.” “Son,” 

184 





LOVE AND EVIL 


said the wise rabbi, “you had better be asleep 
too than to wake to censure your brothers.” 

Love vaunteth not itself, and love reckoneth 
no evil. There are professors of perfect love 
who are anything but courteous or considerate 
of other people’s feelings and sensibilities, 
boorish and bearish and brutish in behavior 
and speech; but they are the devil’s carica- 
tures of a blessing divine. Their spirit is the 
exact opposite of the spirit of perfect love. 
Love doth not behave itself unseemly, is not 
prone to think evil. Love is gentle, peaceable, 
lovable, pure. 

What shall we think about these pessimistic 
professing Christians? What did we think 
about that man with whom we talked on the 
street corner? We thought he was the best 
illustration we knew of that passage in the 
Sermon on the Mount in which the Lord said, 
“Tf, therefore, the light that is in thee be dark- 
ness, how great is that darkness!’* That isa 
very severe thing to say, but it seems the only 
proper thing to say. 

We often have wondered what that passage 
could mean; how any light-bearing body pos- — 
sibly could send out anything else than rays 
of light; and we have tried to conceive of the 
light in the central sun suddenly transformed 


* Matt. 6. 23. 
185 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


into rays of darkness instead, and then 
vomited forth from that central sphere, roll- 
ing on and on through the whole heaven and 
round the whole earth, till the stars would be 
blotted out of the sky and the moon would be 
hidden and black: and then through the ether, 
in volumes of denser darkness, cloud upon 
cloud, pressing the worlds into deeper and yet 
deeper night, until the universe would be 
packed with such a pitch-black gloom as no 
eclipse and no midnight ever has suggested to 
men; and then that once light-giving sun con- 
tinually belching its blackness everywhere, all 
the light that was in it transformed into oppo- 
site and infinite night—how great would that 
darkness be! 

In the physical heavens that condition may 
never be seen; but Christian mythology de- 
clares that in the spiritual heaven that marvel 
was one time wrought. It tells us that a being 
stood near the very throne of God whose tran- 
scendent excellence gave him even in the glory 
of heaven the title of Light-bearer, Lucifer. 
It avers that the light which was in him was 
transformed into darkness, and he is no longer 
the light-bearer but the night-bringer instead. 
Howgreat is his darkness no one can tell; but 
he is the prince of those wandering stars to 


whom is reserved the blackness of darkness 
186 


LOVE AND EVIL 


forever, he emits error and blindness and dark- 
ness alone, he dwells in an outer darkness 
where there is and shall be weeping and gnash- 
ing of teeth. 

Now, we say solemnly that the nearest ap- 
proach to these imaginations in present-day 
experience is to be found in the man who once 
enjoyed the baptism of perfect love but has 
allowed that experience to sour in his soul. 
All the light which was once in him has turned 
into darkness, a greater spiritual darkness 
than any other we know. He who falls from 
the highest height falls into the lowest depth. 
It takes an angel to make a devil. It takes the 
backslidden professor of perfect love to make 
the perfect Pharisee. 


V. Love SkEes THE LOVABLE 


We have looked at the contrast long enough. 
Love is everything which this contrast is not. 
Love is both blessed and a blessing. Jesus 
said in the beginning of that Sermon on the 
Mount, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they 
shall see God.”! Here the apostle Paul tells 
us, “Blessed are those who have been per- 
fected in love, for they shall see good wher- 
ever it is possible to see it.” Love thinketh 
no evil where no evil seems. Love delights in 


1 Matt. 5. 8. 
187 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


the good and rejoices in all which is noble and 
true. It was Emerson who said, “The light 
by which we see in this world comes out from 
the soul of the observer.” If that soul, then, — 
be filled with love, it will see everything in 
the light which love sheds upon it. Goethe 
has put the same truth more briefly still, 
“Each man sees what he carries in his heart.” 
If a man, then, has a heart which is filled with 
love, he will see what is lovable, if it is possible 
to find it anywhere. 

Haydon the painter met Jeffrey and Scott 
in Edinburgh in 1820, and he said of them 
afterward: “Jeffrey has a singular expression 
—poignant, bitter, piercing—as if his counte- 
nance never lighted up but at the perception 
of some weakness in human nature. What- 
ever you praise to Jeffrey, he directly chuckles 
out some error that you did not perceive. 
Whatever you praise to Scott, he joins heartily 
with yourself and directs your attention to 
some additional beauty.” Sir Walter Scott 
must have been much the more lovable char- 
acter of the two. John Morley, in his Life of 
Gladstone, says, “He has not been in public 
life all these years without rubbing shoulders 
with plenty of baseness on every scale, and 
plenty of pettiness in every hue, but he has 


always kept his eyes well above it. Never was 
188 


LOVE AND EVIL 


there a man more wholly free from the starch 
of the censor, more ready to make allowances, 
nor more indulgent even. He will not linger 
a minute longer than he must in the dingy 
places of life and character.” Gladstone must 
have read and studied this chapter on love 
to good results in his life. 

Frances Willard says that when she was a 
girl she took this verse for a motto: 

“T pray the prayer of Plato old, 
Oh, make me beautiful within, 
And may mine eyes the good behold 
In everything save sin.” 

They tell us that Queen Victoria gave some 
advice to a young girl, whose mother had re- 
cently died, and who was about to take her 
mother’s place at the head of the household of 
her father, an ambassador to an Eastern court. 
The queen said: “I shall not advise you about 
this duty or that in detail. Knowledge will 
come with everyday requirements of the posi- 
tion. I wish you to carry with you one sug- 
gestion from me which I hope you will not 
forget. You will meet many people whom you 
will not understand, and many whom you will 
think that you cannot love. Bury the bad in 
people, and always seek for the good. Do this, 
and England will honor you as she honored 


your mother.” It was the advice of Queen 
189 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


Victoria; it is the advice of the King of kings. 
He would have us perfected in love, and then 
love in us would not always be looking for 
evil. 


VI. Love Is LIKE JESUS 


Jesus was given to us for the perfect ex- 
ample. “He saw in every human soul a maj- 
esty and beauty which was veiled to other 
eyes, whether it was the soul of a speechless 
child or of a learned rabbi, the soul of a loath- 
some leper or of a Roman ruler. He stood still 
before every human soul, and his loving eye 
pierced through all its repulsive or unseemly 
wrappings until he had found in it the breath 
of God. He sought in every man the image 
of God, and he discovered in lost and ruined 
humanity that center of his being, loved of 
God and redeemed of God, in need of rescue 
and capable of rescue. He saw every man in 
the light of the redeeming love of God; and 
he saw in him a brother.” 

The Jews thought that Jesus was not patri- 
otic because he was not narrowly nationalistic 
in his sympathies. They said to him, “You 
are a Samaritan,” simply because he was not 
anti-Samaritan in the same bitter spirit and 
to the same intense degree in which they were; 


just as some of the disciples of Jesus were 
190 


LOVE AND EVIL 


called “‘pro-German” simply because they re- 
fused to hate the Germans as some of their 
ecclesiastical brethren did in the time of the 
Great War. Jesus preached his gospel of love 
to the Samaritans and had a great winter re- 
vival among them and found them much more 
ready to receive his message than his own 
brethren among the Jews had been. He re- 
fused to call down fire from heaven to punish 
inhospitable Samaritans; and when he wanted 
an example of uncalculating goodness of heart 
and unalloyed kindliness of character for one 
of his parables he actually chose a good 
Samaritan to be the hero of his tale. It was 
as though a preacher should make a Turk his 
example of philanthropy for the world to-day. 

No wonder that the Jews thought that 
Jesus was unpatriotic. He was, if patriotism 
and jingoism are synonymous. He was, if 
internationalism and patriotism are incon- 
sistent. He was, if a genuine belief in the 
Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of 
man was impossible to a patriotic Jew. His 
sympathies took in all alike. He loved all 
men. Every man was his brother, for whom 
he would labor and suffer and die. He seemed 
to think that Christian love was more pa- 
triotic than nationalistic hate. He seemed to 


think that the temporal interests of each na- 
191 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


tion were best preserved in service to the 
eternal interests of all. 

That is the spirit of Jesus, the spirit of 
perfect love. The spirit of Jesus would drive 
out the spirit of gossiping and slander and 
spiritual pessimism and national jingoism, 
and it would bring in the spirit of interna- 
tional brotherhood in perfect love. 


192 


CHAPTER VIII 
LOVE AND THE TRUTH 


I. WoOLFENBUTTEL AND LESSING 


Wolfenbiittel is a German town seven miles 
or so from Braunschweig. When we visited 
it, it had over thirteen thousand inhabitants, 
a ducal chateau, and an ancient mortuary 
chapel, and a seventeenth-century church, the 
Marienkirche, which was well worth seeing ; 
but Wolfenbittel was world-famous for its 
great library, and it was this library which led 
us to set aside one day for a visit to the town. 
It was one of the largest and most valuable 
collections of books and manuscripts on the 
continent of Europe. There was the famous 
portrait of Spinoza on the walls, and a por- 
trait of Martin Luther by Cranach. Among 
the precious possessions of the library were 
Luther’s inkstand and drinking glass; and 
most precious of all, Luther’s own Bible, with 
annotations in his own handwriting around 
the margins of almost every page. 

The Bible was under lock and key; and we 
could look at it only through a glass case. We 


usually were satisfied with the arrangements 
193 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


which seemed proper to the museum and other 
authorities everywhere; but a great desire 
seized us to get Luther’s Bible into our own 
hands. It seemed to us that to touch it would 
be a benediction, and that we would enjoy 
turning its leaves a little while and reading 
a few of Luther’s own marginal notes, more 
than we would enjoy turning the leaves of any 
other book we ever had seen. It would be a 
memory for a lifetime. We tried to persuade 
the gruff old custodian to permit us to handle 
it; but we evidently were foreigners who could 
not be trusted, or the book was too precious to 
be touched by’anyone, and he would not allow 
such a thing. 

There were other relics and curiosities in 
the library with which they were not so care- 
ful. We turned one of the first geographical 
globes that was ever constructed, and saw the 
queerly outlined continents of that early 
medieval geography. We looked through 
black-letter volumes of the Dark Ages, and 
saw some of the most beautifully illuminated 
manuscripts and parchment volumes we have 
found anywhere. It was a rare treat even to 
look upon these treasures. We felt there in 
the Wolfenbiittel library something like Peter 
felt on the Mount of Transfiguration, as if we 


would like to build a tabernacle and abide. 
194 


LOVE AND THE TRUTH 


We have been in royal and imperial palaces; 
but we never felt that we would care to stay 
there long. We have been on mountain top 
and ocean wave, and we have seen many beau- 
tiful sights and enjoyed them to the full; but 
we never stood on any spot anywhere where 
we felt we would like to live indefinitely, 
unless it was in such a library as they have 
there in Wolfenbiittel. 

There were thousands of rare and ancient 
manuscripts, and many of them would have 
been more valuable than many diamonds to 
us; and there were hundreds of thousands of 
books, covering the whole period of literature 
from the earliest days of printing till now. 
It was a great storehouse of knowledge, a 
mine of literary wealth, an almost inexhaust- 
ible supply of known and recorded truth in 
almost every field of thought. To have access 
to it, to have the control of it, to be in any 
sense master of it, it would be worth while to 
build a tabernacle and abide. 

This world-famous library has had a world- 
famous librarian. Lessing was in charge of 
it for years; and the historians have likened 
Lessing’s influence in poetry and literary 
critique to Luther’s influence in the realm of 
religious thought. What Wittenberg was to 


the Reformation, Wolfenbiittel was to the 
195 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


literary Renaissance of the nation. It was 
among these books that Lessing wrote and 
thought. He was happy in his labor, cease- 
less in his application, a student because he 
loved to study and because he could not live 
without it; and it was Lessing who made that 
famous statement, quoted so often since, “If 
God held all truth shut in his right hand, and 
in his left nothing but the restless instinct 
for truth, though with the condition of for- 
ever and forever erring, and should say to me, 
Choose! I would bow reverently to the left 
hand and say, Father, give! Pure truth is for 
thee alone.” 

That sentiment has been so universally ap- 
plauded that there would seem to be some- 
thing in it to recommend it to the universal 
heart. It is the expression of the humility 
which all great scholars have felt before the 
boundless possibilities of research and of 
knowledge on every hand; and it is the expres- 
sion of the priceless pleasure the real student 
feels in the search for truth, whether that 
search be successful or not. Truth-seeking is 
a blessing in itself. It is the highest calling 
to which a man can dedicate his life. The 
money-makers and the fame-finders and the 
world-conquerors may be blessed in their way 


and in their measure; but the students, the 
196 


LOVE AND THE TRUTH 


investigators, and the discoverers in a lifetime 
of toil satisfying the restless instinct after 
truth have a higher pleasure and know a 
deeper joy than these. 


Il. TroutTs SEEKERS 


All hail to the great army of truth seekers 
everywhere. We see them peering among the 
stars of the sky and the flowers of the meadow; 
we see them hammering away among the 
stones and knocking at every open door which 
nature and the universe can furnish them. 
Some of these scientists may not agree with us 
in their conclusions, but they are equally earn- 
est in their search for truth; and we wish them 
all Godspeed. They belong to the noblest 
army on earth. They are engaged in the high- 
est work of which man has been made capable. 
They are on their pilgrimage way to the holy 
land of Truth. Like the crusaders of old their 
ery can be, “God wills it, God wills it!” 

We see them searching all the books. We 
see them listening in all the halls of learning 
in all the lands. We see them marshaling 
before them all the great spirits of the earth 
and plying them with questions. Theirs is a 
lofty mission, to find the Holy Grail of truth, 


to overcome all obstacles and penetrate all 
197 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


barriers until they reach the North Pole of 
truth, to uncover all the secrets of the universe 
and unfold all life’s mysteries, to tear away 
all masks and all deceptions and disclose the 
very features of the face of truth, to storm 
Truth’s kingdom from every avenue of ap- 
proach on every side and take full possession 
of all its territory. It is the crusade of the 
centuries, the ceaseless mission of the noblest 
souls among men. God has planted within 
them the restless instinct for truth, and they 
seek after it for ever. All hail! Godspeed! 
They are blessed in their searching, so 
blessed that Lessing said that if God held 
all truth in his right hand, and in his left 
nothing but the restless instinct for truth, he 
would choose the latter gift, that he might 
search forever, but when Lessing said that 
he was more of a student than a Christian, 
more of a philosopher than an apostie. He 
had lost sight of the end in his satisfac- 
tion with the means. He who seeks for the 
truth is blessed in his seeking, but if at the end 
of a lifetime of search he has found only error, 
he dies in disappointment and despair. If he 
is blessed who seeks for the truth, he is thrice 
blessed who finds it, and from the firm vantage 
ground of truth attained sends out his in- 


quiries into the farther deep. If there be joy 
198 


LOVE AND THE TRUTH 


in the sowing of the springtide, there is greater 
joy in the Thanksgiving season and the Har- 
vest home. 

Lessing would say, “Pure truth is for God 
alone;” and he seems to suggest that man 
never can attain unto it. Is this true? Are 
we doomed to search and never find? Are 
we to be knocking forever and yet never have 
the door opened unto us? Is Taine’s picture of 
the university students of the Middle Ages to 
be true forever of the race? Taine tells us of 
the many thousands who thronged the uni- 
versity halls in the days of the great 
scholastics, and he says of them: “These 
young and valiant minds thought they had 
found the temple of truth; they rushed at it 
headlong, in legions, breaking in the doors, 
clambering over the walls, leaping into the 
interior, and so found themselves at the bot- 
tom of a moat. Three centuries of labor at 
the bottom of this black moat added not one 
idea to the human mind. They seemed to be 
marching, but they were merely marking 
time.” Is that description to be the abiding 
description of the truth seekers of all time? 
Lessing would seem to say so. 

Ancient heathenism always said so. It was 
a legend of antiquity that mortal man could 


not look upon the face of the Goddess of Truth, 
199 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


and live. She was of necessity a veiled god- 
dess, and man could have only some faint con- 
ception of her beauty as it might shine through 
the enshrouding veil. 

Modern infidelity would say the same thing. 
Voltaire has written by way of confession his 
personal experience. He says: “I am ignorant 
how I was formed, and how I was born. IL 
was perfectly ignorant for a quarter of my 
life, of the reasons of all that I saw, heard, 
and felt, and was a mere parrot, talking by 
rote in imitation of other parrots. When I 
looked about me and within me, I conceived 
that something existed from all eternity. 
Since there are beings actually existing, I 
concluded that there is some being necessary 
and necessarily eternal. Thus the first step 
which I took to extricate myself from my 
ignorance overpassed the limits of all ages— 
the boundaries of time. But when I was desir- 
ous of proceeding in this infinite career, I 
could neither perceive a single path, nor 
clearly distinguish a single object; and from 
the flight which I took to contemplate 
eternity, I have fallen back into the abyss of 
my original ignorance.” There at the bottom 
of that black moat, in the abyss of his original 
ignorance, Voltaire lived and died; a man 


with a restless instinct for truth and cease- 
200 


LOVE AND THE TRUTH 


lessly searching after it, but forever erring in 
his search and finding instead of truth only 
his infinite ignorance. 

Hume has given us a like testimony: “TI 
seem alfrighted and confounded with the soli- 
tude in which I am placed by my philosophy. 
When I look abroad, on every side I see dis- 
pute, contradiction, and distraction. When I 
turn my eyes inward, I find nothing but doubt 
and ignorance. I am confounded with ques- 
tions. I begin to fancy myself in a very de- 
plorable condition, environed with darkness 
on every side.’ He was a truth seeker, but 
without a sight of soul-satisfying truth. 


Ill. TrotH FINDERS 


Can truth, then, never be found? We have 
heard the answer of ancient heathenism and 
of modern infidelity, and the answer of the 
German critic and philosopher. Let us turn 
now to the Word of God, and hear its answer 
too. Paul writes to Timothy, “God will have 
all men to be saved, and come to the knowledge 
of the truth.” He would not have them for- 
ever searching unsuccessfully; he would have 
them finally and forever attain to the knowl- 
edge of the truth. To that end he incarnated 


Truth Divine; and sent it in the person of his 
201 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


Son as a full and free revelation to all men. 
That is the message of the Gospels, “The Word 
was made flesh, and dwelt among us—and we 
beheld his glory, the glory as of the only- 
begotten of the Father—full of grace and full 
of truth.” The ancient fable was disproved ; 
for men looked upon the Truth and did not 
die, for he had come that they might have life 
and have it more abundantly. 

The Truth had descended to earth; and he 
stood in the midst of world history with the 
declaration, “I am the way, I am the Truth, 
I am the life;”* and men looked upon the 
Truth and lived. John wrote in his Epistle, 
“We know that the Son of God is come and 
has given us an understanding, that we may 
know him that is true; and we are in him that 
is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ.2 ... 
Hereby we know that we are of the truth, and 
shall assure our hearts before him.”* Heart 
assurance instead of infidel ignorance! Here 
is no veiled divinity before which man as in 
heathen superstition must forever blindly bow. 
Jesus stood in the midst of men, saying to 
them in all simplicity of promise and omnipo- 





1 John 1. 14. 
2 John 14. 6. 
31 John 5. 20. 
41 John 3. 20. 
202 


LOVE AND THE TRUTH 


tence of power: “You shall know the truth, 
and the truth shall make you free. There 
shall be the blessedness of searching after 
truth, and the threefold blessedness of finding 
it as well.” 

Paul recognizes that possibility; and he 
adds another crowning attribute to his de- 
scription of Christian love. Love is eager for 
the truth, searching ceaselessly after it, re- 
joices without measure in it when it is found, 
accepts it without hesitation, is devoted to it 
in every form. Like that man of the parable 
who found a treasure hid in a field, and for 
joy thereof went and sold all that he had and 
bought that field, love seeks for the truth 
as a pearl of great price, a treasure hid but in- 
comparable; and love finds it at last, and 
prizes it so highly that all else would be 
sacrificed if need be to preserve its possession. 
Love rejoices in the truth, is not willing to 
let it slip by any means, for any cause. Love 
values the truth too highly for that. 


IV. TrouTH REJECTERS 


That is not true of all men. When the 
Truth incarnated in Jesus was present among 
men, many of them refused to believe and re- 


ceive him. Instead of rejoicing in the truth 
203 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


they refused to accept it. One of those clos- 
ing scenes in the life of Jesus when he stood in 
Pilate’s judgment hall has been called the 
scene of “the great refusal.” Pilate asked 
“Art thou a king?” and Jesus answered: 
“Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end 
was I born, and for this cause came I[ into 
the world, that I should bear witness unto the 
truth. Every one who is of the truth heareth 
my voice.” Then Pilate said, “What is truth?” 
and without waiting for an answer went away. 
Jesus was a King, the King of truth. He 
stood at the head of a kingdom, the kingdom 
of truth. Pilate knocked for entrance at the 
door of this kingdom and then went away 
before anyone could answer the knock. He 
had the opportunity to know the truth and 
to be numbered among the possessors of the 
truth; but he slighted the opportunity and 
he neglected and rejected the privilege. It 
was the great refusal of his as of any man’s 
life. 

That was one of the most dramatic scenes 
in the New Testament history. Jesus stood 
there, the King of truth; no such King as the 
Jews had desired him to be, no such King as 
the Romans had any reason to fear, but the 
King of truth. Pilate stood before him, at- 


tracted by him, believing in his innocence, con- 
204 


LOVE AND THE TRUTH 


scious of his dignity and power; and Pilate 
heard him say, “I am the king of truth;”’ but 
Pilate was a politician, anxious to preserve 
his position, and outside yonder were the 
influential enemies of the Christ at the head 
of a raging mob. If he did not yield to their 
wishes, they would complain to Cesar and his 
position would become a precarious one; and 
what would all his friends say if he should be 
deposed? How his enemies would rejoice 
if he should be sent into exile! “Which will it 
be, Pilate? will you stand with the people who 
are in power and thus preserve your social 
position and your political preferment, or 
will you stand with this King of truth, though 
you should stand alone?” 

Pilate said, “What is truth? I used to think 
when I was a young man that I would seek 
for the truth and never rest till I found it; 
and then I would rejoice in it, confess it, love 
it, die for it if need be; and I would consider 
that the noblest calling and the grandest 
pursuit in life. However, I have seen a hero 
die with this despairing cry upon his lips; 
‘O Virtue, I believed that thou wert, but now 
I see that thou art a mere shadow! And I 
have heard the philosophers teaching in their 
schools, ‘Doubt everything; only this one thing 
is certain—that nothing is certain. Then 

205 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


what is truth and who can show us the truth? 
The Stoics tell us that the best thing which is 
given to man is the power to take his own 
life; and the Epicureans tell us, ‘Eat, drink, 
and be merry; for that which the senses enjoy 
is all that you really possess.’ What admira- 
tion for truth philosophical doubt has left 
in my heart, Epicurean lust long ago has 
smothered under its silky folds; and the dried- 
out remnant of love for the pure and the good 
it left in me, the pursuit of politics and the 
lust of position strangled long since. It has 
led me step by step here to Jerusalem, here to 
this judgment seat, here before this man who 
maintains that there is such a thing as truth, 
and that he is the King of the truth; and he 
says, ‘Every one who is of the truth heareth 
my voice.’ Shall I listen to him? No; if he 
should persuade me, I would lose my position 
and then what would people say?” Pilate rose 
from his judgment seat and hastened away, 
fleeing like the coward that he was, turning 
his back upon the truth, and in that great re- 
fusal committing spiritual suicide, regicide, 
deicide, murdering the King of truth upon the 
cross. 

The spirit of Pilate still is alive in this 
world. There are men to-day who have gone 


through the schools and have come out of 
206 


LOVE AND THE TRUTH 


them doubting the existence of truth any- 
where. There are other men who have dead- 
ened their consciences in the pursuit of pleas- 
ure and the lust for power. There are other 
men who are ready to say, ‘There are so many 
different religious systems in the world, and 
within each of these systems there are so many 
different sects, and within each of the sects 
there are so many different presentations of 
their creed; and where so many opinions are 
intermingled in inextricable confusion like 
snowflakes driven between opposing winds, 
how can one decide between them, how can 
anyone tell us what truth is?” There are 
other men who are asking themselves, “If I 
should join the church, how would it affect 
my social or political position; and if I should 
become converted, what would people say?” 
The spirit of Pilate still lives in the world, the 
spirit of the skeptic and coward. 

The mob still cries for the crucifixion of the 
Christ. Many of the influential members of 
society do not believe in him and are opposed 
to him still. He stands before each man and 
asks him to judge his claims to be the King of 
truth, to listen to his voice and believe. If 
any man refuses to hear, Jesus sits upon the 
judgment seat and pronounces sentence: “Ye 


would not come to the light, because your 
207 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


deeds were evil. Ye refused to rejoice in the 
truth, ye have preferred to risk adherence to 
a lie. The kingdoms of this world can control 
only the bodies of their subjects; but my king- 
dom is not of this world; my kingdom is a 
spiritual kingdom, and it reaches and rules 
the soul. The earth kingdoms count their 
subjects as so many heads; but in my king- 
dom nothing will count but consciences clean 
in the sight of God and man. Here good and 
evil are mingled together, but in my kingdom 
only spotless priests are citizens and kings. 
Here might makes right, but in my kingdom 
only love can dwell and rule.” 

Let love rejoice in this kingdom of the 
truth; for it will outlast all other kingdoms. 
It will be the eternal kingdom in the city of 
our God. Paul says that love will do nothing 
else. ‘‘Love rejoiceth not in iniquity, but re- 
joiceth in the truth.” 

Does anybody ever rejoice in iniquity? Re- 
joicing in iniquity is worse than committing 
it. Yet there are those who not only sin but 
boast of their sins. When Paul would draw 
his blackest picture of the vices of the Gentile 
world, he climaxes the awful description with 
a list of revolting crimes and then adds that 
the Gentiles not only do all these things but 


they give their sanction and approval to those 
208 


LOVE AND THE TRUTH 


who practice them.> They not only do un- 
righteous things, but they rejoice in- them. 
Paul says here that love will negative that 
entire description. It will neither sanction 
nor approve nor consent to any form of un- 
righteousness. It will condemn all such 
things, and forbid them as far as possible. 

The negative and the positive assertions are 
joined in this sentence. Love rejoiceth not 
in iniquity of any kind; that is the negative 
statement. Love rejoiceth in the truth; that 
is the positive assertion. There are those who 
rejoice in a lie. When Jesus would utter his 
most sweeping condemnation of the unbeliey- 
ing Jews, he said to them: “Ye do the things 
which ye heard from your.father. Ye are of 
your father, the devil. He standeth not in the 
truth because there is no truth in him. When 
he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own; for 
he is a liar, and the father thereof.’’® In the 
closing book of our canon, the book of Revela- 
tion, there are two pictures given us. In the 
one we see a countless host of the white-robed 
before the throne, and we hear their songs of 
praise resounding through all the courts of 
heaven. It is the song of love, redeemed and 
purified, and rejoicing in the truth for ever- 

5 Rom. 1. 32. 


6 John 8. 38, 44. 
209 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


more. At the walls of the city we listen; and 
outside there is the sound of barking and wail- 
ing and shrieking and cursing, a discord of 
passion and pain. Then John tells us, “With- 
out are dogs, and sorcerers, and murderers, 
and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and 
maketh a lie.”” Paul declares that love will 
represent the antipode of these descriptions 
by Jesus and John. It stands in the truth. 
It loves the truth. It does the truth. It re- 
joices in the truth. 

“Love bids touch truth, endure truth, and embrace 

Truth, though, embracing truth, love crush itself. 


‘Worship not me, but God!’ the angels urge: 
That is love’s grandeur.” 


It will make any sacrifice for the truth. 





7 Rev. 22. 15. 


210 


CHAPTER IX 
THE CLIMAXING RESUME 


I. “Love Breareto ALL THINGS” 


Fénelon said, “In order to be satisfied even 
with the best people we need to be content 
with little and to bear a great deal. Even 
the most perfect people have many imperfec- 
tions, and we ourselves have no fewer. Our 
faults combined with theirs make mutual 
toleration a difficult matter, but we can fulfill 
the law of Christ only by bearing one an- 
other’s burdens. There must be a mutual, 
loving forbearance.” Love bears with its 
neighbors, finds excuses for their shortcom- 
ings, throws a mantle of charity over their 
faults, is ready to make the best possible out 
of any dubious transaction, and is eager to 
give credit to good motives everywhere. It 
is, as Lowell says, 

“A love that gives and takes, that seeth faults 
Not with flaw-seeking eyes, like needle-points, 
But loving-kindly, ever looks them down 
With the o’er-coming faith that still forgives.” 
Love bears up under any burden. Samuel 


Rutherford was in prison for fidelity to his 
214 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


faith when he wrote: “What power and 
strength are in His love! I am persuaded it 
can climb a sweet hill, with hell upon its back; 
and swim through water and not drown; and 
sing in the fire and find no pain; and triumph 
in losses, prisons, sorrows, exile, disgrace; 
and laugh and rejoice in death.” It was said 
long ago, “Many waters cannot quench love, 
neither can the floods drown it.” Love comes 
out dry, or at least alive and breathing. Love 
beareth the seemingly unbearable. 


II. “Love BELIEVETH ALL THINGS” 


It is not a dupe, but it has boundless faith. 
It is shrewd but not suspicious. It believes in 
God and in all things God has made. With 
George Miller it is ready to say, “To those 
who love God, out of a thousand troubles nine 
hundred and ninety-nine work together for 
good—and one more.” It rejoices in trial. It 
is of good cheer in the midst of persecution. 
When faith has won the victory love makes 
it more than conqueror. 

It sees good in everything. Lowell has sung 
love’s insight well in these words: 

“Love is blind but with the fleshly eye, 
That so its inner sight may be more clear; 
And outward shows of beauty only so 


Are needful at the first, as is a hand 
212 


THE CLIMAXING RESUME 


To guide and uphold an infant’s steps; 

Fine natures need them not: their earnest look 

Pierces the body’s mask of thin disguise, 

And beauty ever is to them revealed 

Behind the unshapeliest, meanest lump of clay, 

With arms outstretched, and eager face ablaze— 

Yearning to be but understood and loved.” 
Edmund Spenser had expressed the same 
truth long before: 

“For lovers’ eyes more sharply sighted bee 

Than other men’s, and in deare love’s delight 

See more than any other eyes can see, 

Through mutuall receipt of beames bright, 

Which carry privie message to the spright; 

And to their eyes that inmost faire display, 

As plaine as light discovers dawning day.” 


Love understands and loves. It recognizes 
the Divine in every man. It believes all 
things to be possible to one made in the image 
of God. It despairs of no man’s reputation. 
It will not limit the possibilities of any man’s 
regeneration. It has boundless faith in God, 
and that leads to limitless faith in men. Like 
Jesus, it would despair of no man. It would 
rather be deceived and disappointed in some 
than to be distrustful and suspicious of all. 
Even in a Judas it will see the possibility of a 
saint. It will befriend the publicans and 
sinners because even in their drunkenness and 
harlotry it will forecast their soberness and 


their exceeding love. As Tennyson said, 
213 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


“Tn Love, if love be love, if love be ours— 

Faith and unfaith can ne’er be equal powers; 

Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all. 

It is the little rift within the lute 

That by and by will make the music mute, 

And, ever widening, slowly silence all.” 
Perfect love has perfect faith. Love believeth 
all things. 


Ill. “Love HoretH ALL THINGS” 


When disappointed in actual facts, when 
faced with man’s failure to meet the require- 
ments of God’s law, when forced to acknowl- 
edge that man has fallen short of the glory of 
God’s ideal for him, love’s faith becomes 
boundless hope for the sinner’s recovery and 
a limitless aspiration for the world’s regenera- 
tion. He who believes all things to be possible 
to one made in the image of God will hope all 
things in regard to the realization of these pos- 
sibilities. In its brother’s present defeat love 
hopes for future victory. It forgives seventy 
times seven, because it believes in the ultimate 
triumph of the right and the good. This faith 
abides without breaking. This hope lasts to 
the very end. 

Love looks to the time when there will be 
no far countries given over to riotous and re- 
bellious living, but all lands will be subject 


to the one righteous and loving King. With 
214 


THE CLIMAXING RESUME 


Brother Lawrence love learns “that all things 
are possible to him who believes; that they 
are less difficult to him who hopes; that they 
are more easy to him who loves, and still more 
easy to him who perseveres in the practice of 
these three virtues.” Christianity is the reli- 
gion of the Great Hope. It preaches the pos- 
sibility of repentance and regeneration to all. 
It believes that no individual is irredeemably 
depraved. It hopes that all nations will be 
won to its Lord. 

Its God is the God of hope. Its gospel is 
the gospel of hope. What faith believes, hope 
expects and receives. Faith says, “God can.” 
Hope says: “I believe he will. I anticipate the 
answer to my prayer and my desire.” Henry 
Drummond was a good example of Christian 
love. His biographer says of him, “He was 
always hopeful about the most hopeless, 
picked out some good points in the worst, and 
sent a man away feeling that he was trusted 
once more, not only by this friend, but by 
Christ, by God.” 


IV. “Love ENpURETH ALL THINGS” 


The psalmist prayed for his enemies, but he 
did not pray that they might be saved. He 


prayed that their teeth might be broken and 
215 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


that their little ones might be dashed against 
a stone. Those retaliatory petitions in what 
we call the imprecatory psalms mark the Old 
Testament antithesis to the New Testament 
doctrine and experience of Christian love. 
When Jesus was reviled, he reviled not again; 
when he suffered, he threatened not. He en- 
dured all things patiently, committing himself 
to Him who judgeth righteously. He was 
tried and harassed; but he never became 
moody or cynical, and he never doubted or 
despaired.” Having loved his own, he loved 
them even when they deserted him at the end. 
Having loved the world, he loved it even while 
it nailed him to the cross. He endured with 
patience and he loved with a radiance which 
made his life the supreme manifestation of the 
divine. 

It was in this patient suffering that Peter 
says he left us an example, that we should 
follow his steps.’ Following in his steps, 
Christian love will triumph everywhere, until 
the Californian loves the Japanese, and the 
Frenchman loves the German, and the Irish- 
man loves the Englishman, and the poor love 
the rich, and all the oppressed and the suffer- 
ing classes in their enduring love have pos- 
sessed their own souls and won their enemies 


11 Pet. 2. 21. 
216 


THE CLIMAXING RESUME 


to their all-conquering faith. It is the task 
which the Holy Spirit has set before himself 
in this world, a task which will be complete 
when the love which endures all things has 
become the characteristic of all Christians, 
even as it was of the Christ. 


217 


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PART THREE 


IN THE HEIGHTS 


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IN THE HEIGHTS 


I. Is Tuts Porric HYPERBOLE OR POSSIBLE 
EXXPERIENCR? 


A RECENT writer has said: “This chapter is 
a* jewel of literature, set with diamond 
thoughts. It has rhythm and splendor, climax 
and poetry, antithesis and hyperbole.’ We 
object to the last word of this statement. Paul 
is not setting forth a poetic fancy in this 
chapter. He is not allowing himself to be 
carried away by his enthusiasm. He is not 
picturing an impossible ideal. He is not 
hyperbolical in his description. He is putting 
before the Corinthians the supreme standard 
of excellence. He presents it as the ultimate 
object of attainment. It is not comparative 
but superlative in character. It is not “a 
more excellent way.” It is the most excel- 
lent, the superexcellent, the supreme. Paul 
regards this as the best conceivable state of 
Christian grace which he could promise to 
Christian effort and present as a _ possible 
achievement through faith and prayer. 

There is no hint either in the passage itself 


or in the context that Paul intends his poetry 
221 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


to pass into hyperbole. He puts down noth- 
ing which is merely fanciful, purely imagina- 
tive, and clearly beyond realization. This 
ideal experience was to be put into practice 
in Corinth; and if there, it surely is attainable 
anywhere else. Corinth consecrated sensu- 
ality. It was the center of the worship of 
Aphrodite, the lowest form of desecrated love. 
Corinth needed this Epistle, and this chapter 
in the Epistle, to make clear to the Corinthians 
what love could be and should be. If “he who 
dwells within the purview of Calvary can be 
victorious even within the purlieus of 
Corinth,’ it will be possible in any environ- 
ment. Martineau was right when he said, “Of 
nothing may we be more sure than this—that 
if we cannot sanctify our present lot, we could 
sanctify no other. Our heaven and our Al- 
mighty Father are there, or nowhere.” All 
things are possible to faith. Love can be lived 
in any place. Lowell says: 
“Love is a thing to walk with hand-in-hand 
Through the every-dayness of this work-day world, ... 


A simple, fireside thing, whose quiet smile 
Can warm earth’s poorest hovel to a home.” 


Paul would have this love at home in every 
heart, in every hovel and every palace, in every 
nation and in all the world. This is possible 


because, as Longfellow told us, 
222 


IN THE HEIGHTS 


“Tt is the heart, and not the brain, 
That to the highest doth attain; 
And he who followeth Love’s behest 
Far excelleth all the rest.” 


This is Paul’s prescription for all the spir- 
itual ills represented in the Church of Christ. 
It was to be tested and proved in immediate 
use and in continuous cherishing. Did any- 
one ever present all these characteristics in 
full measure? Yes, we already have said that 
we have in them a perfect picture of Jesus; 
and the Christian is to be like him, walking 
even as he walked. 

Jesus said, “A new commandment I give 
unto you, that ye love one another as I have 
loved you.” It may seem impossible at first 
thought. 


“Tove as He loved! How can we soar so high? 

He can add wings, when He commands to fly. 

Nor should we be with this command dismayed; 

He that example gives, will give His aid.” 
Jesus showed that human nature could con- 
tain enough of the Divine to realize these 
characteristics of love in a human life. In 
our measure we are to realize them too. 


II. THe Two PATHS 
John Wesley has a sermon on “The More 
Excellent Way,” and in it he says: “From 


i John 18. 34. 
223 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


long experience and observation I am inclined 
to think that whoever finds redemption in the 
blood of Jesus, whoever is justified, has then 
the choice of walking in a higher or a lower 
path. I believe the Holy Spirit at that time 
sets before him the more excellent way, and 
incites him to,walk therein; to choose the nar- 
rowest path in the narrow way; to aspire after 
the heights and the depths of holiness—after 
the entire image of God. But if he does not 
accept this offer, he insensibly declines into 
the lower order of Christians.” 

To those on the lower planes this descrip- 
tion will seem like hyperbole, while to those in 
the heights it will be a possibility. That sug- 
gests the figure with which our study began. 
We said that this chapter represented the 
highest peak in the Pauline Epistles, and that 
the experience presented here was the highest 
height to which even his daring spirit ever 
climbed. Wesay that it is possible of achieve- 
ment but we do not say that it is easy to 
attain. 


Ifill. Tur Great TRIAL 
It is like climbing to a mountain summit. 
A mountain trail is a great trial; a trial of en- 


durance, a trial of patience, a trial of faith. 


It is a trial of muscle and soul, a trial of 
224 | 


IN THE HEIGHTS 


heart and lungs and nerves, a trial of weary 
feet and dizzy head, a trial of the whole man, 
determining his whole worth. One must climb 
up and up, though the heart flutter with 
fatigue, though the eyesight grow dim from 
the overexertion; up and up, though the path 
is stonier and all verdure fails, though trees 
and shrubs are left behind and there is no 
longer any hope of a draught from a wayside 
spring, though there is nothing in prospect 
but a rocky waste until the summit is reached ; 
up and up, though it is weary climbing: it is 
the only way into the heights. 

“Then life is—to wake not sleep, 

Rise and not rest, but press 
From earth’s level where blindly creep 


Things perfected, more or less, 
To the heaven’s height, far and steep. 


‘Where, amid what strifes and storms 
May wait the adventurous quest, 
Power is Love—transports, transforms 
Who aspired from worst to best, 
Sought the soul’s world, spurned the worms.”’ 
There are many Christians who are willing 
to follow the Lord through green pastures and 
by still waters, but who fail in courage and 
strength to follow him when he leads them 
into the heights. Yet he always is doing that 
with his disciples. Jesus did it with the Twelve 


again and again. When he wished to flee from 
225 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


the multitudes into the very presence of God 
he went up into the mountains to pray. It 
was almost as though he seemed to think that 
God would be nearer to him there. When the 
time had come for him to be transfigured he 
took his chosen three apart with him into a 
mountain top, and there it was that the glory 
of God was revealed to him and to them. 
When the time had come for his ascension to 
the Father’s throne he appointed a mountain 
top as the last meeting place with the apostolic 
band; and from that mountain top of Olivet 
he went straight into the skies. 

It was on some commanding altitude that 
he preached the marvelous Sermon on the 
Mount. If any Christian never has had the 
Master deal with him as he dealt with his dis- 
ciples in that searching sermon; if any Chris- 
tian has gone for years and years without any 
transfiguration and ascension experiences, it 
has been because he was unwilling to climb; 
for these experiences are given only to those 
who have gone upward and on and on to meet 
with the Master on the heights. 

The Lord’s elect climb into the heights with 
him. They gird themselves for any sacrifice 
of strength and time which may be necessary ; 
and they climb Mount Tabor and Mount 
Carmel and Mount Hermon and Mount Nebo 


29 
hs Lb 


IN THE HEIGHTS 


and Mount Olivet and Mount Calvary; up and 
up, though the path be stony oftentimes and 
it be weary climbing. That is the way into 
the heights, and the Lord meets them on the 
mountain top; and they see him as he is, and 
they become like him in all the character- 
istics of his love. On the highest summit the 
vision is clearest, and God and heaven are 
nearest ; and they find rich reward. They can 
bear all things, believe all things, hope all 
things, endure all things in that Presence. 
Their love never will fail. 

The always aspiring disciple will feel like 
that saint who said: “For many a day I have 
not seen the top of the mount. I have stood 
on the plain, or I have gone to the first cleft, 
or have tried a short way up the steep. I have 
not risen above the smoke of my own house, 
or the noise of my daily business. I have said: 
‘In my climbing I must not lose sight of my 
family; I must be within call of my children; 
I must not go beyond the line of vegetation; 
even in religion I must be prudent.’ Thus I 
have not seen the top, nor have I entered into 
the secret place of the Most High. O that I 
might urge my way to the very top of the hill 
chosen of God! The wind will be music. The 
clouds will be as the dust of my feet. Earth 


and time will be seen as they are, in their 
227 


THE HEIGHTS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 


littleness and their meanness. My soul, move 
up to the very top; let no stone be above thee; 
higher and higher; God awaits thee, God calls 
thee, God will give thee rest! This day I will 
see the sacred top. The enemy will try to 
turn me back, but I will meet him in the 
strength of God, and abash him by the name 
of Christ. Lord, help me this day to see the 
very top of the mount, and let my poor soul 
taste the sweetness of the liberty which is 
assured to it in Christ.” This is the aspira- 
tion which finally reaches the goal. 

Our treatment of this chapter has been all 
too inadequate. We may have had many 
things to say as we climbed the heights, but 
now that we have reached the summit we are 
stricken with silence. The outlook is too 
sublime to be put into words. The horizon 
is too far-reaching to be compassed by any 
phrases at our command. We only look, and 
love. 


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